For 23 years after the appearance of my first book, I was stymied, as far as paper publication went.

Apart from the PDF publication of my second novel, in 2005, I couldn’t get a nibble. Not just the novels, either. Even my poetry books failed to garner print editions.

My on-the-job hours didn’t help either – nights and weekends. So much for networking.

~*~

Looking back, I can acknowledge how some writers’ circles have been very helpful along the way.

The first was an off-campus group in Bloomington gathered around the annual review Stoney Lonesome, named after a village in bucolic Brown County nearby. Once a month, its editors hosted a group that had a featured reader followed by an open mic and sometimes gentle criticism. It gave me the nudge to go deeper into poetry – “You’re hooked,” as one said – along with some great tips for submissions to the small-press scene. I was also invited to coedit an edition, which came out shortly I had relocated to Washington state.

I’ve never been one to be in a writers’ circle closely critiquing each other’s work. The time commitment was one problem, along with the difficulty of finding the right mix of participants. You know, like being a classical musician in a punk band.

There was a group in Baltimore during my sabbatical year, though I’m not sure where its core energy was. The highlight for me was a talk by Tom Clancy just before the movie version of Hunt for Red October was released. I don’t even remember where our regular meetings were held.

In New Hampshire, several open poetry mics took place on nights I could attend. One was weekly in Concord, filled with a hip young crowd and some edgy writing. I was the featured poet there on several occasions.

Another was a poetry group at the local Barnes & Noble, mostly young writers and good energy.

And then I relocated to the seacoast and got bumped to working the second shift, which did free up my Saturdays, if I could get up and away in time.

I joined the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, which had a major event each quarter – the same date, alas, as my ministry and counsel committee of New England Quakers met. The poetry group was more attuned to rhyme-tasters and school programs than to the avant-garde realm I’ve pursued.

Instead, a weekly series just over the state line in Massachusetts filled the gap. Held in a coffee house at the back of a boatyard and overlooking the harbor, Merrimac Mic had a lively bunch of regulars and gave me the featured reader spot multiple times. Isabell was a most appropriately eccentric emcee and organizer.

Performing your work before a crowd is a fine way of measuring its status. The energy of the audience can reflect whether the piece is effective as well as expose deficiencies. Besides, it’s an excellent way to pitch in with a group, as you would at a potluck dinner.

I’m not so sure about contests, but it seems to keep some other writers energized.

At the newspaper, I didn’t go straight from full-time employment to retirement. In the midst of some contentious contract negotiations, some of us were offered a chance to take a buyout. Then it was yanked off the table only to resurface on short notice. I took it.

That gave me a heavenly midwinter month where I indulged in a reading orgy, supported by the monthly severance checks. But the newsroom was short-staffed and wanted me back as a part-timer up to four days a week. Somehow, that felt quite different from the earlier tensions. I could choose which nights I wanted free, and I was no longer party to the office politics.

That’s how I had the Monday night off for a monthly Writers Night Out in Portsmouth, a wide-ranging mix of writers – filmmakers, ad copywriters, playwrights, public relations folks, in addition to poets, short-story writers, and novelists – who met over beer and appetizers or snacks. Writers’ schmooze, as I called it. Each of us briefly shared something about our latest project before the full gathering, accepted feedback, and then broke out into smaller clusters of similarly engaged individuals. Somehow, we weren’t competing with each other – I especially valued the perspective of a well-place sci fi writer and a younger multimedia artist – and the chatter was always helpful. The frustration of marketing was probably our No. 1 topic of discussion.

Those events ran about the time I took up blogging – or building my platform, as we were advised. It’s probably where I first heard about WordPress. And it’s definitely where I first heard mention of Smashwords. (What!?)

Yes, especially, Smashwords.

I hadn’t even considered the option of ebooks, and everything I’d heard up to that point was beyond my budget. Not so here.

Now, as I was saying about getting together with other writers? It really is essential.

Let me confess to the allure of having an author’s photo and bio blip on the back dust jacket of a hardback volume. That’s always carried so much more gravitas than a mere newspaper byline – in my early days reserved only for major stories rather than distributed to just about every headlined item, in part to shift the blame for errors – or, one step up, the columnist’s thumbnail mug shots, for the truly honored writers. A magazine’s contributors page was a step up, especially when they included a full-color photo.

It’s not that being honored was essential – I was an anonymous, behind-the-scenes copy editor, after all – but more an acknowledgment of success, especially when it signified not being a hack. It’s just that everyone harbors a desire to be important, at least to someone, right?

~*~

For me, having the manuscripts but working on them part-time, I sensed myself racing a ticking clock. Would time run out on me?

The book publishing world was shrinking, as was daily newspaper journalism that provided my paychecks. Fewer houses were publishing fiction, and even those were in turmoil. They wanted blockbusters rather than the cottage-industry lines that previously prevailed.

Literary agents were struggling to support the writers they had and were less likely to take on new clients who would require more time and effort to promote. One, who had been considered hot just the previous year, replied to my query – a rarity, by the way – saying my proposal was an important book but not “commercially viable.” Another, equally acclaimed, vented her frustration with the changing publishing world and her struggles to cope within it.

Well, it did remind me of a letter I received from a newspaper editor I greatly admired during one of my job-hunting interludes. He was warm and welcoming, but confessed his career had turned into heading papers through their final days. From what I saw, he did manage some glorious sunsets.

My personal writing turned to several nonfiction projects that had commercial potential, but they, too, failed to break through the brick wall. One problem was that I was only a writer rather than an expert with academic or other highly placed credits.

It was a vicious circle. To get published, you had to have been published to some success.

~*~

It paralleled my earlier efforts to land a position on a major metropolitan newspaper. There had been some near misses, but the Union Leader proved to be a better fit for my remaining career. I even made it to the finishing line in a rapidly shrinking field.

In addition, “making it” as a poet was looking more and more like a dead end. Who can even name a living poet?

Back when I was a summer camp counselor, I had one of Phil Donahue’s kids among my assigned campers. On parents’ night, he advised me to revise, revise, revise, as he was doing as a newscaster. And then he turned into a hot syndicated talk-show host.

It took me a while to appreciate his counsel, along with the adage, “Talent goes into the first draft, genius goes into the revision.”

Originally, my feelings about revision were like those regarding playing musical scales, relegating the practice to a secondary status nay nuisance. It took me a long time to appreciate doing it as a practice in itself rather than as a prelude to the primary action.

Indeed, more than once I’ve discovered a better novel buried under the first draft. Or perhaps lurking in its bones, waiting for release, akin to Michaelangelo’s block of marble.

It’s never easy, though. Thorough revision takes longer than the draft did, and that’s for each sweep. The fact remains that multiple deep revisions will be required.

One of the places it engages me is the use of synonyms. I’ve come to rely on a thesaurus more than some other writers, and doing so comes with a caution. While it increases the vocabulary count and possibly adds words a reader doesn’t know, I feel it allows me to unpack dimensions of a central word or phrase that keeps repeating in a long work. In my case, there are usually 20 or so in each piece, and I find them cloying. Take the term “revision,” which turns out to include amendment, reconsideration, modification, adjustment, alteration, change, correction, improvement as its shadings. It’s much more thorough than typical editing.

In some of my manuscripts, the revisions demanded I change the tense throughout, as well as the point of view – third person to first to second, for example. The genders of key characters even flipped.

With ebooks, I’ve even replaced the titles and characters’ names.

~*~

While I had done major revisions on Subway Hitchhikers from its inception to the breakthrough publication, the manuscript had also grown blubbery with backstory and detail in the in-between stages. My revisions occurred in sweeps in my moves from Ohio to Indiana to Washington state back to Iowa and another corner of Ohio and finally Baltimore, adding backstory and explanation before landing on the butcher block that produced a lacy, playful ride through the imagination.

Still, that process was nothing like what happened after my move to New Hampshire and had a computer to work from. I can’t imagine trying to retype so many pages on paper, nor did I have the funds to hire a typist for the pile of drafts in front of me. Remember the poor starving artist image?

When Hitchhikers came out, I had been in New Hampshire three years.

I had all that excess from its intervening years and saw promise for several new books in those pages. I took them back to the drawing board.

Emotionally, I was going through a long recovery period, including therapy – self-induced depression, as I quipped. In the process, I was learning to take feelings more seriously, and that extended to my revisions. What was the underlying feeling in a particular line or scene, rather than simply the action or physical detail? That sort of thing.

At least I once again had mountains at hand, abetted this time by the Atlantic, and even a boss with a sailboat for some of my initial outings.

With a pile of drafts already keyboarded, I could pick up a section in any available time and work away to make it somehow better.

This was when I really began to appreciate the importance of deep revision. Not just the superficial polishing to make a story read more clearly, but transformations to probe into underlying events. I was examining much that I had experienced in my life without fully seeing what was happening at the time. Some of these were shared by many in my generation. Some by kindred spirits who were simply somewhere out of the spotlight. And some were essential unique and personal.

~*~

As I reflect on the revision process here, I ask about what was going on in the background. Remarrying grounded me, for certain, and gave me a sounding board for troubling passages. As I’ve joked, everything before that now became ancient history, including the substance of the lingering novels.

What, if anything, was playing in the background as I worked in the top-floor next, my not-quite Fortress of Solitude? Kronos Quartet, late Miles Davis, or the Shostakovich preludes and fugues might give me a different ambiance than Bach organ works or Beethoven – some inclination for edginess or gravity, depending. If someone was in the bedroom on the other half of the top floor could have an impact, too, if only by limiting by space to pace within.

The view outside, the weather, even the season of the year?

So far, I haven’t heard any discussions about the practice of revising, certainly not along the scale of drafting. I’m coming to think of it as living with a project, the way you would with a kid in the household, knowing vaguely that at some point they’re going to grow up and leave.