Every book has its time

by M. L. Buchman

I just about split a gut laughing when I saw this month's theme here at Romancing the Genres.

Why?

Because the theme this month is "Adventures in Travel" and later on the day you're reading this post, a book that I've been working on for twenty-five years will go up for pre-order: Mid-life Crisis on Wheels - a bicycle journey around the world. 

It's the non-fiction tale of burned-out computer geek, who lost everything (career, house, even car) and set off on a solo journey around the world because...well...because it was the only thing that made sense at the time. It's a story about me.

For 18 months, I traveled in the direction of the setting sun until I arrived back where I started, but as a very different person.

The curious fact here to do with the writing is that I've written this book four times: 

• Immediately after the end of my trip (two years before I became a published writer). It acquired several rejections at the time.
• Five years later I tried redrafting the book with little more success (I'd published 2 novels by then and was deep in my third, but this book was still beyond my skills). It acquired many more rejections this time.
• I took another stab a decade after that, discarding the first draft entirely and starting from scratch (but I just couldn't seem to get the story right and I didn't bother submitting it anywhere).
• Then, on the 26th anniversary of my departure, I started this version.

What happened was, after a normal day of writing, I decided to peek inside that third draft and revisit the trip just for myself. What I discovered was a good, fun, solid story...mired in "okay" writing (I'm being kind). I started to tinker and soon fell into the manuscript completely.  

I finally had enough perspective to tell the story that needed to be told. (The fact that I'd written 50 novels and a hundred short stories in the intervening decade probably helped.) The core of the tale is not the story of the trip (the way the first three drafts were written), though those amazing adventures are certainly there. But rather the journey of the cyclist and how he's been changed through his life by the adventure.

Stephen King has talked about how he had the idea for his Dark Tower series at nineteen, but knew for a fact that he wasn't capable of writing it yet. Whether by specific plan or happenstance, he set it aside for twenty years until he achieved the necessary skills.

I'm not saying that Mid-life Crisis on Wheels is my Dark Tower. But I don't think I could have written this book even a year ago. Now I have and I'm thrilled with the tale it tells. This book releases in October. In November, I have a pure military techno-thriller coming out entitled Drone. The latter is far and away the most challenging and advanced writing I've yet achieved.

I always thought that certain books required a particular set of writing skills. But what if it wasn't just practice. Yes, I couldn't have written either of these without all of those other stories under my belt. But I'm coming to believe that every book also has its own time. I don't think that a younger version of me could have written either one as well.

Maybe not every book has its time...but both of these certainly did.

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Introduction: The On Ramp

When did my journey around the world begin?

Did it begin when I was twelve and filled the blank ceiling of my room with dream images of sailing single-handed around the world?

Or perhaps at the age of twenty-five when I stood, feet braced wide against the pitching of the Lady Amalthea? She was a lovely, though rather run down, fifty-foot, wooden ketch I had just purchased and barely knew how to handle. The journey certainly didn’t start when I sold her three years later, though perhaps it came a little closer. I’d finally learned that she’d never been designed for deep sea and perhaps I hadn’t been either. (Though I still miss her every single time the wind ripples the water.)

The journey drifted a bit nearer when a new assistant at a law firm where I was a paralegal introduced himself with, “I’m Christopher. Sell it all and go now.” My reply was some lucid comment on the order of, “Um, hi.” I had no idea what he meant.

Now I do. I’ve received worse advice often, but only rarely have I received better.

The best advice I ever received was a few years after the journey chronicled here.

It came from every single one of my friends upon their first meeting with the girlfriend who would eventually agree to become my wife. Every single one of them, including my sister, delivered it in almost identical words, “If you fuck this up, we’re going to kill you.” My wife is awesome and engenders that kind of loyalty from people with an ease that still shocks this socially awkward boy despite twenty-plus years together.

The first turning point which I can truly identify after Christopher’s introduction, was five years later on August 23rd, 1992. (In a few moments you’ll see how I can pinpoint that date.)

I’d just flown into Seattle for four days. It was the longest I’d been back at home in six months. I’d taken a half-partnership in a small, but very high-end computer consulting firm. A dot-com before there were dot-coms or even a public Internet. I slept on planes. I ate in restaurants, sometimes in three different cities for three consecutive meals. At home was a computer network for 3 a.m. testing of software I’d be installing the next day in Calgary or Houston. The only ones using my bed were my cats and an ex-girlfriend and her fiancé who were my regular house-sitters. Honestly, they lived there more than I did.

On that cool evening of August 23rd, a pounding on my front door dragged me from a hurried bowl of chili I was trying not to slop over my latest printout. Silhouetted against the late summer sun stood a specter which thankfully resolved itself into my friend George. I offered him a glass of wine; in return he assaulted me with a question.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?”

I was wholly unable to answer.

For the following four nights, rather than sleeping, rather than the urgent programming I needed to do, I repeatedly flung myself upon the poniard of his question. I didn’t even understand what he was asking, nor could I find an answer he’d accept no matter how I twisted and turned. Yet for some reason, each evening I agreed to meet—sometimes at my house, sometimes at his—like a Shakespearian tragic hero.

The fourth night as I left his house, I looked aloft at the stars shining impossibly bright against the midnight sky. Understand that I love astronomy and the stars. I ran the college planetarium for four years and presented hundreds of shows there to thousands of students from schools all around the area. I often wonder why I didn’t pursue that field of study.

As I breathed in, the heavy green of late summer filled my lungs. Summer was near gone. I’d missed an entire season (two of them actually as I’d missed spring as well). I was missing my life. I had become a workaholic, the ones who I’d always considered “deluded.” The ones I’d jeered at (quietly, I’m not a rude sort). Worse, I now saw that I’d been that way for at least a decade.

I was thirty-four, burned out, I’d thoroughly scared off the few girlfriends I’d found out of the women who didn’t just avoid me to begin with. I worked hard on my career and I thought that working just as hard, with just as intense a focus on a relationship, should work just as well. Right? Of course right! …or not.

I began to laugh.

It was like all the folly of all the choices I’d made since roughly, oh, the day I graduated from…uh, kindergarten(?) became clear in that single expanse of brilliantly starry sky.

And couldn’t stop laughing.

I collapsed in hysterics on George’s front lawn soaked in a chill dew, filling the night with my howls. The laughter continued so long and hard his wife almost called 911 before I recovered.

I faxed in my resignation the next day.

I was now the proud owner of:

·        a house that I’d spent every spare minute and dollar of seven years remodeling for a family I’d never had time to find

·        just one very expensive consultant-type suit (the rest were shredded by my ex-business partner)

·        a disconnected cell phone (to have one at all in 1992 was a great anomaly; to make it work, I had three accounts with three different companies in my three major cities and had to change my phone’s settings from one number to the next every time I flew)

·        about five months’ worth of mortgage in my savings account. Due to a small legal loophole that my ex-business partner had slipped in, my departing share of my company was worth $3,000 rather than the mid-six figures I knew to be its value.

I spent the first three months’ of my savings: watching TV, eating, and rereading old science fiction (one month each). I couldn’t even face new books.

I certainly couldn’t return to my career. Even if I could tolerate doing so, every connection I’d built over the prior decade got burned in the collapse of my personal dot-com disaster. Seattle, Calgary, Denver, Oklahoma City, Houston, anything to do with the corporate offices of Microsoft, Oracle, Compaq, the Association of Systems Managers… The list of broken connections goes on.

“You could sell your house. That would open up your options.”

“I could what?”

I’d finally called Mac, my best friend, late one night just past Christmas in a fit of depression. I was so far down that I had started the conversation with, “Just so you know, I’m not considering suicide, but I don’t have any brilliant ideas either.”

Selling my precious house, and the dream of family I’d built into it, was not the sort of irrelevancy I wanted to hear.

“If I sold the house…” (insert loud scoff). “Not a chance!”

But if I did...

I could go back to school.

In what?

I could start a new career once freed of the overwhelming mortgage. But I couldn’t imagine anything that would be different enough to be tolerable. I had always loved my work; now all it gave me was dry heaves when I thought about it too much.

For two weeks that broken sentence followed me about like a needle stuck on an old phonograph.

I could...tick!

I could...tick!

I could…

With no one kind enough to lift the needle. Actually, my friends tried, but I couldn’t find any verb-object combination that completed that phrase.

January 10th, 1993, I was walking in the chill sunlight along the pedestrian path around Seattle’s Greenlake Park, when a bicycle whizzing by me nearly clipped my elbow.

I spun around at the last second, probably all that saved me from being thrown to the ground on the otherwise empty walkway. Looking the other way on the path was like looking at a whole new landscape.

I could...bicycle around the world.

It was ludicrous.

It was insane!

…but what if it wasn’t?

My last vacation had been three weeks cycling through New Zealand. The one before that was a five-day, three-hundred-mile charity ride across Washington State. Before that, a group ride with one of those companies that takes care of hotels, meals, and luggage for a week along the Oregon Coast.

My weekends, back when I’d still been able to occasionally etch one out of the hard corporate clay, had been things like riding a century (a cyclist’s term for a hundred miles) around the steep canyons of the fourteen-thousand-foot dormant volcano Mount Rainier, including a ten thousand-foot high pass.

I could bicycle around the world.

Actually, it was the first thing that had made sense in ages.

My journey had begun.

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Coming October 22, 2019

M.L. "Matt" Buchman has over 60 novels, 100 short stories, and a fast-growing pile of audiobooks out in the world. M.L. writes romance, thrillers, and SF&F…so far. Recently named as one of “The 20 Best Romantic Suspense Novels: Modern Masterpieces” by ALA’s Booklist, he has also been selected three times as "Top-10 Romance Novel of the Year." NPR and B&N listed other works as "Best 5 Romance of the Year." As a 30-year project manager with a geophysics degree who has: designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, and bicycled solo around the world, he is awed by what's possible. More at: www.mlbuchman.com.