Way back in the fall of 2010, I had a dream that I wrote a novel called The 13th Clock. I saw the cover art, and my name at the bottom. When I awoke, I had no idea what this book would be about, but I knew the title, and I knew its characters would travel the world looking for this mysterious clock.
When I picked Simone up from elementary school that day and told her about my dream, we had a fun discussion about possible stories. I was pretty sure I wanted to write another young adult novel, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it so a teen protagonist would be able to travel easily.
And then...exactly a week later, I had another 13th Clock dream. This time, I saw the first couple of paragraphs of the novel, and woke up knowing who my lead character was, and how she could move across the globe. I wrote the first two paragraphs of the book that morning, and told Simone about them on our way home after school.
At the time, she was still only able to ride in the back seat of the car, so our conversation took place via the rearview mirror. The leaves on the tall trees down the boulevard had taken on those deep golds and russets you only get when they could drop at any moment. But it was still a warm day and I had my window open a crack, allowing in the scent of the last mow of the season, and of oak, crushed leaves, and dust.
We were both thrilled that a story was coming together.
And then...well...I wrote a few pages here and there, but struggled to find — no, to make — the time to write. A month or so later, when Simone asked me if I’d had any 13th Clock dreams lately, I told her they’d stopped.
“You need to write up to where the dreams left off, Daddy,” she said. “And then they’ll start coming again.”
She was right. And though I’m not a new year’s resolution kind of guy, I resolved to write a minimum of 10 pages per week, every week, in 2011. I figured I could manage two pages per day during the workweek. Simone created a special alarm that would go off at 1:11 PM to remind me to write. It still goes off every day but Saturday.
Though I didn’t write those 10 pages every single week, I wrote almost every day and extra on weekends and during travel. And then, in a marathon session to get the novel done before the end of the year, I spent the last week of 2011 in Seattle, writing in coffee shops, knocking out 125 pages in four days of fevered creation.
I’d done it. I’d written a 500 page novel in a year, and I had a feeling it was pretty good.
That January, inspired and thrilled, I did two solid read-throughs and revisions, tightening things up and scooping up most of the typos and errors. Family members (including Simone) who previewed the book in that form gave me the best praise they could have — they were so engrossed in the story that they forgot it was an unpublished manuscript written by...well...me.
In the The 13th Clock, Sarah Tuesday, her father, and little brother Rex, are art thieves who swipe artifacts and return them to the countries from which they were pilfered. But when their father is taken from them, the siblings end up on the run. Along the way, they learn that their mother had been a Clock — a member of nigh-immortal secret cabal with the ability to manipulate time (and a penchant for twisting it to change world events). Sarah has inherited her mother’s gift. And though there’s plenty of action and humor, the book has its touching moments as Sarah and Rex try to regroup and build a family of choice from the people in their lives.
So, with dreams of a quick pickup, and the second book already coalescing in my head, I sent the manuscript out to select literary agents and publishers.
And...nobody called me and said, “Holy crap, this is an incredible story! We need to publish it right away.”
What they did say was that they enjoyed the read, but that the backstory got in the way of the action-packed narrative. In the book, the kids’ adventure is punctuated by chapters that tell the story of how Sarah’s mother and father met and fell in love, and introduce the mystery of their mother’s disappearance.
The best, most complete feedback I received was from a literary agent I met at a conference in LA and then sat down with in London.
He said, “The good news is that you are a very good writer, and your story has potential. So often, we get bad writers with good ideas, or good writers with bad ideas. So you are marketable. But your narrative is fundamentally flawed. The action, which you write well, comes to a complete halt every time you have a chapter from the past.”
In other words, I had way too much backstory for a first novel in a larger series.
The agent told me I needed to cut the novel by more than a hundred pages, saving some open loops for the future books.
It was both heartbreaking and energizing to get that kind of raw, detailed feedback, and it took me several weeks to pick up the manuscript again to make the cuts he was talking about. The long slog began.
In the meantime, though, I wanted to introduce the story of Sarah and Rex as soon as possible — to create their storyworld and build a fan base. The 13th Clock is a transmedia project, where the narrative hops from platform to platform — novels, shorter stories, mysterious websites, real-world artifacts and experiences — where readers become part of the story along the way. One wonderful side effect is the way Simone has become an enthusiastic supporter in building mystery and interaction across platforms.
So, at the urging of my good friend and colleague, I began writing novellas to introduce the characters and their world — the first was “The 3rd Caper,” and the second was “Sarah Tuesday on the Run.” The third novella will be released this summer.
Because my buddy is a digital storyteller and Internet pirate (and constantly kicks my ass about writing and creating), he and I decided to forego finding a publisher for the novellas, instead moving them right onto Amazon to see if we could sell some copies and build demand for the novel. Both novellas are selling (print copies as well as Kindle versions), though I could definitely use some more reviews for each of them (hint, hint).
And just a couple of weeks ago, I woke up with an idea for how I could cut a full 10,000 words from the novel. That’s 40 page chunk of narrative. With that big trim, and the more gentle cuts I’d been making over the last several months, I finally cut The 13th Clock by 26,000 words, or roughly 100 pages. So I’m giving it yet another read-through, to make sure the edits didn’t mess with the continuity, and then...well...
What’s next is a big riddle. With so much changing in the world of publishing, authors like me are no longer quite as beholden to agents and publishers as we once were. These days, there’s very little stigma in self-publishing, and the advantages — ownership of your intellectual property, a bigger cut of profits, a closer connection to your audiences — are significant. At the same time, publishing the first 13th Clock novel on Amazon would mean limited distribution at book stores, and, honestly, as a reader and print guy, the gravitas that a publisher like a Scholastic or a Chronicle or a Penguin could bring to the project is meaningful to me. At least to my ego.
That said, marketing and outreach is what my company does. If I make The 13th Clock a WideFoc.us client, then I have a team to help build engagement for the storyworld. And with my colleague’s content propagation chops, it’s not like we need help in building buzz and awareness for a brand we believe in.
At the moment, there’s time to look at both approaches. I’ll send out the manuscript again to agents who expressed interest in reading a trimmed-down story. But I’ll also start working with my friend on a roll-out plan for self-publishing.
In the meantime, we’ll see how the first three novellas do in creating conversation and demand. I’m just launching a dedicated Facebook page today (yes, it needs work), and we’ll dig deeper into the alternative storytelling spaces in the coming months. If our traffic and sales continue to bloom through the summer, then autumn (and back-to-school) could be a very interesting time for Sarah Tuesday.
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