The novel, available on Amazon.

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a mystery novel, a mystery novel that only one agent and zero editors believed in. This mystery novel was read by editors at top publishing houses including Dutton, Harper, St. Martin’s Press, Harcourt, Tor and Poisoned Pen. It was even read by a major movie studio. Yet none of them were willing to take a risk on the novel.

“The mystery market is too crowded,” they said. “We don’t see how it can stand out.”

Never, though, did they say it wasn’t good enough, that it wasn’t well-written.

So, for many reasons, A Real Piece of Work never found a home among mainstream publishers. Which is why, about a month ago, I finally self-published it as a Kindle ebook.

Since then, between Amazon US and Amazon UK the novel has netted 21 reviews—19 of them 5-star raves. Readers write how they lost sleep over A Real Piece of Work. The most recent reviewer writes, “Read this book when you have a day to spare. You won’t be able to put it down.”

A forlorn slush pile.

Had I not published it on Kindle myself, the novel would have lain dormant on my hard drive or a slush pile somewhere, and I would have always wondered what readers thought of the book. It turns out they think a lot of it. They love it—some so much as to beg me to release the second one in the series tomorrow.

I’m tremendously grateful to readers who have posted reviews or told their friends about the book, but the most important thing they’ve done for me is to remind me that it’s all about them. It’s all about the readers, not the agents and editors.

All readers care about is whether a book is a good read, a well-written story. But because my pursuit was agent- and editor-centric for so long, I forgot whose opinion I really cared about—the reader’s.

I read this somewhere—I can’t remember where—and I realize it’s more true now than ever: “The reader’s opinion is the only one that counts.” I’ve always written with the reader in mind, but now I’m going to write that truism on a 3″x5″ notecard and post it above my writing desk.

The readers have spoken, and I have listened. It’s all about the reader.

I often go to my bookcases for tried-and-true books on aspects of writing I’m having problems with, but for help on this issue, like Old Mother Hubbard I’ve found the cupboards bare. Even the few books about marketing can’t help me. Less than 2 years old, they’re already woefully out of date.

The trouble is, the paradigm I’ve been laboring under for 20-odd years is now shattered, and I’ve been trying in vain to salvage some of the pieces. It’s as though I’ve dropped a family heirloom vase and am in denial about its shattered state.

Ye Olde Publishing Paradigm (the one that ruled for centuries):

Writer learns craft, maybe works at a newspaper for a while, gets a few short stories published. Writes a novel, perhaps a few, and gets an agent. Agent contacts the major publishers, sells the book (taking 15% in the process). Author gets an advance against royalties (a loan, not free money). Publisher negotiates rights of first refusal on author’s next two books, publishes the first book 18 months later, hopefully in prestigious hardcover. Then trade paper, then mass-market (pocket-sized) paperback. If the author is lucky, someone from Hollywood contacts his agent to option (not buy) the book for a film that, chances are, will never get made. In the meantime the book has hopefully made its way into bookstores, where readers are hopefully buying it and loving it. There may be other subsidiary steps I missed but this is the general idea:

Writer –> Agent –> Publisher –> Bookstore –> Reader

The 21st Century Publishing Paradigm: The writer is the publisher. She writes what she wants to write, and when she publishes it, it goes directly to readers for their purchase and enjoyment. There are no gatekeepers like agents and traditional publishers preventing the writer from reaching readers directly. In fact, the only intermediary is the company that owns the delivery system, or bookstore—Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, B&N’s Nook, Smashwords, iBooks, etc.

Writer –> Bookstore –> Reader

In case you missed it, in the New Paradigm two large and obstinate obstructions between the writer and the reader have been removed.

As I said in my article of a few weeks ago about why I’m publishing my mystery series on Kindle, and as I said to half a dozen newspapers during my self-made publicity “junket,” a writer writes to be read, not to be forced to jump through hoops and told that the market won’t like what the writer is writing. My response to that old chestnut is one of the most basic principles of free market economics: let the market decide what it likes.

When I look at my shelves of hardcover fiction, I feel a pang of sadness for something that will probably never be: my own writing in prestigious hardcover, with acid-free paper, an eye-catching cover and the logo of a major publisher on the spine. Even worse, nowadays when I look at these once proud volumes (the pinnacle of book technology), it’s as though I’m seeing living fossils. I know something important without a lot of evidence for it: The vast majority of print books are going to fade away, to be replaced by slimmer, sharper, more powerful tablets.

One piece of evidence I have for this is that there are successful, traditionally published authors out there who have switched to self-publishing exclusively. In his thorough primer on electronic self-publishing, Let’s Get Digital, David Gaughran profiles an author named Bob Mayer, whose last three book deals prior to self-publishing totaled over a million dollars. Yet, Mayer walked away from traditional publishing and now self-publishes his work. “The main difference,” Mayer says, “is that I have more control than I ever did in traditional publishing.”

My point is, when commercially successful writers like Bob Mayer are leaving traditional publishing behind, how long will it be before the Stephen Kings and Tom Clancys of the world begin to leave it as well?

We’re witnessing a rare occurrence—an overlap in evolution, like when Neanderthal man existed on the planet at the same time as Homo sapiens. Neanderthal man was stronger and probably should have survived, but Homo sapiens was smarter, and did.

So, what is a writer to do who has operated under the old paradigm for all of his adult life? Suddenly, with no gatekeepers in his way, he can publish (from the Latin publicare - to announce, to make public) anything he wants, anytime he wants, reaching readers directly while reaping the lion’s share of the profits. This being the case, should he continue to pursue mainstream publication or representation? If so, why? For prestige? To fill a need for outside approval? Assuming one’s writing is of quality, how is print publication any better—any more prestigious or virtuous—than e-publishing? Are the words of The Great Gatsby any less poetic and utterly perfect presented in e-ink than they are in print? No. In fact, I submit that you could paint those words on a dark cave wall and they would still be as great. Great writing is great writing, regardless of the medium in which it’s published or who decided to publish it.

One of the key tenets of the old publishing paradigm was that as gatekeepers agents and editors ensured that only good quality writing reached readers. Writing that didn’t meet certain standards was rejected. Whether or not their role as gatekeepers has been of service to readers is debatable; but what isn’t debatable is the idea that readers deserve material that is well written. And with writers now filling the roles of agent and publisher for our work (or really publisher and publicist), it behooves all of us only to publish the best writing we can write.

We all need to become our own best editors, too, learning the rules and craft of writing inside-out so that our work is indistinguishable in quality from any work published by “professional,” traditional publishers. Doing this en masse is the only way to defeat the hackneyed argument by the publishing establishment that self-published work is inferior in quality. Doing this will raise the overall quality, benefiting all writers and, more importantly, our readers.

One of the reasons I wrote this piece was to think this issue through for myself, because like a lot of writers who labored under the old paradigm, I’m now unsure about how I should proceed. Everything has changed. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the writing itself. The writing is going to be good or bad, and will come easily or with difficulty, no matter how it is published. However, now that the barriers to readers have been removed, we writers don’t have the publishing industry as a scapegoat anymore. The only limitation on how much we publish, and its quality, is ourselves.

So, as for myself, I know what I have to do, and it’s the same thing I’ve done every day in one form or another, and that’s just write. Write the best I can, every day, and then decide what’s worth publishing.

The novel, available on Amazon.

This one is for you readers. For those of you who took a risk on a relatively unknown quantity (me) by plunking down cash for my PI/mystery novel, A Real Piece of Work. For reading it, and for expressing your love of the book to everyone you know.

Your words of praise for the novel have encouraged me more than I can express.

I also feel vindicated as all hell.

You have to understand—I knew it. Back when I was submitting A Real Piece of Work to agents, and then my agent to editors, I knew that if I could just get the book into the hands of readers…well, I knew you would love it. At the time, however, the book and I first had to run the gauntlet of mainstream publishing.

Indy outrunning the giant boulder in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Looking back on the experience, it was like that scene at the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones is running out of the cave, clutching the golden idol like a football as the cave collapses around him. Except in my version, the cave was mainstream publishing, the golden idol was my manuscript, and the light at the cave entrance was publication (preferably in hardcover).

In the movie, Indy outruns the giant boulder and makes it to the light.

In my story, the cave collapsed around me.

But I survived. I survived and crawled out of the rubble with my book intact. After a suitable recovery period, I looked around for a more direct route to readers, which I found in KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing).

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in the film masterpiece "Double Indemnity."

The great Billy Wilder, screenwriter of two of my favorite films, Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity (co-written with Raymond Chandler), had great faith in an audience. Remarking on the wisdom of movie theater audiences, he once said, “An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark— that is critical genius.”

Although my audience for the novel has yet to reach a thousand, I’m gratified that so far they’ve been in agreement about the novel’s virtues. Following are snippets from their Amazon reviews, as well as some of their comments on Facebook and Twitter:

“I read A Real Piece of Work in three days. I could not put it down. Didn’t get much sleep for a couple of nights, but it was well worth it.”

“I can’t believe how addicting this book was.”

“Orcutt’s masterful addition of wit and humor makes A Real Piece of Work that much more irresistible for those who haven’t historically flocked to the mystery genre. Dakota Stevens and his indispensable sidekick/chess champion Svetlana Krüsh are intoxicating and a delightful modern take on the noir detective style.”

 “The author’s ability to paint a picture or scene with words is astounding.”

“The characters came to life in 3D for me. I know Hollywood will come knocking on this door, and even though it is premature the movie could never hold a candle to this book!”

“From chapter one, you don’t want to put the book down.”

“A Real Piece of Work is a proper, old-school P.I. novel. It’s fast-paced and exciting, with snappy dialogue, likable characters, and a thrilling plot that kept me guessing right to the end.”

 “Looking for a good winter read? I’m proud to share the work of a great writer (and happy to say, a friend), Chris Orcutt.”

“I found myself amused and intrigued in every chapter. Orcutt can weave a story that keeps you hanging on until the very end. The action, tension, and suspense make you feel the need to desperately turn the page.”

“Read this journey. It’s a rare literary mystery.”

“In the presence of a shapely vixen whose hair smells like mint, a guy can stand idly by in his shorts for only so long.” OMG @chrisorcutt

“A Real Piece of Work claims to be the start of a series of books centered around a detective named Dakota Stevens, and I for one hope that the series goes on forever, for what we get in this first outing. People in the reviews keep mentioning Spenser/Robert B. Parker, and they’re right; but add a good streak of John Le Carré, turn the roaster up a notch, and maybe you’re getting in the ballpark.”

“I have enjoyed all of the Spenser novels, but Dakota Stevens and his sassy sidekick Svetlana, are my new favorite detectives.”

“The writing style is engaging and witty, the plot twists reel you in from the first page, and the characters came to life. I literally couldn’t put this book down until I finished it. I am now stalking this author on Amazon, anxiously awaiting the release of his next book in the series.”

Hard at work on my beloved Hermes 3000—arguably the best manual typewriter ever made.

Of course I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop—the inexplicable one-star review that claims my novel is the worst thing that reviewer has ever read and that I should be summarily exiled to Antarctica for publishing it

But in the meantime, I’m going to bask in the wisdom of the audience.

Thank you again to all of you who purchased and reviewed the novel, and I invite anyone else reading this to pick up a copy—whether for yourself or as a gift for a mystery lover.

Thank you, too, for vindicating me, for proving I was right.

I wrote the novel for you readers, not agents and editors, so to receive your praise and the ultimate compliment—your time—makes what has been an arduous journey completely worth it.

—

Photo by Jen Cray

THE OTHER DAY, I wrote that I was going to “take it easy” when it came to self-promotion, but you know what? Screw that.

I don’t want to take it easy. I don’t want to be modest, humble, or self-deprecating. I’ve done that all my life, and I’m sick of it. I was raised by honest and hardworking Mainers—parents and grandparents—who imbued in me the sense that a person shouldn’t brag or go on about himself. Promoting yourself, they suggested, was unseemly.

But as a 20-year professional writer of journalism, video scripts, magazine articles, technical manuals, speeches and a ton of unpublished (and some published) fiction, I’ve learned a few things, and one of the things I’ve learned is that there are a lot of lesser writers out there doing very well for themselves, and do you know why?

A recent newspaper article by Kate Goldsmith of the N. Dutchess News about me and "A Real Piece of Work."

That’s right—because they promoted themselves. Because they talked about their work at every turn and made no apologies. Because they didn’t wait around for outside approval of their work or of their status as writers. Because they declared themselves writers and forced the world to consider them as such.

As a kid, I moved too many times; an average of once a year until I was 18. Consequently, wherever I was living, I didn’t want to make waves. I just wanted to get along. Even in the town where I graduated from high school, although I threw some legendary parties there, I was hardly known as Mr. Popular or Mr. Self-Promoter.

The sad fact of it is, I’ve spent the last 20 years playing down myself and my accomplishments, and I don’t want to do it anymore.

Recently the pain of continuous rejection of my work by mainstream publications brought me precipitously close to taking my own life. Beyond that, I found myself consistently thinking that I wouldn’t mind if I were hit by a bus or struck by a falling tree limb. Ultimately I wanted to die, but I didn’t want to take responsibility for the act.

Since then, I’ve gotten on some new medications that are working wonders. Say what you will about the pharmaceutical industry, but as a guy with a potentially paralyzing mental illness, I can declare with authority that some of what they produce actually works and is doing some good in the world.

In my case, they’ve cleared up my thinking, made me 5x more productive, and inspired me to speak up for myself and my work—with confidence—for the first time in my life.

So allow me, if you will, to “sound my barbaric yawp[s] over the roofs of the world,” to “celebrate myself,” as Walt Whitman also put it—to share some of my accomplishments and to declare myself to the universe as a unique creation, never before seen or to be seen again when I shuffle off this mortal coil:

I am a very good writer, and I believe I have the capacity to become a great one. My idols, the writers to whose level I aspire, are the best of the best: Chekhov, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, White, Cain, Chandler, Cheever, Carver, Nabokov, Keillor and Boyle.

I have written millions of words. Millions. First as a philosophy student, then as a newspaper reporter and freelance writer. Later as a technical writer and speechwriter. Recently as a playwright. And forever as a storyteller. In published and unpublished novels and stories, not to mention 20 years of journal writing, I conservatively estimate I’ve written 5 million words.

In the past 18 months, I have written 25 stories and at least a dozen humorous sketches, all of which have been rejected (so far) by mainstream publications. Of these works, by my excruciatingly high standards I would say a dozen are very good and 6–8 are great pieces of work. I’m not giving up on any of them, but especially not the great ones. I’m confident that some editor out there is going to “get” them and want to publish the work. I’m confident that before I die I will write one solid collection of short stories, and I’m also confident that if I continue to write my very best, I might, just might, pen one perfect short story—one “The Lady with the Dog.”

You have to admit, you admire my brazenness and consistency.

I have written 2 exceptional mystery/PI novels—A Real Piece of Work and The Rich Are Different—that I believe have the potential to become modern classics in the genre. They are as well-written and well-told stories as any being published by mainstream publishers today. And I have drafts and outlines of 4 more. One book, you got dick; three, four, five books, you got yourself a series.

I am not a writer who can be pigeonholed, even if, for years, I kept trying to do it to myself. I can do it all—and well—and I refuse to make apologies for it anymore.

I am proud that I have learned to write almost entirely on my own—by writing daily and reading deeply about the subject.

I write every day, and have written every day—at least a page—for 20 years. It’s how I process the world. The world doesn’t make sense to me until I write it down. Writing gives me clarity, and I try to give back to the world some of the clarity it gives me.

Screw taking it easy.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

I’ve received dozens of messages from would-be book-buyers who say, “I’d love to read A Real Piece of Work, but I don’t have a Kindle.”

NOTE: You don’t need a Kindle to read my novel. With the FREE Kindle Reader app, you can read it on your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Droid, Windows 7 Phone, or your computer.

Here’s the page for the novel:

A Real Piece of Work at Amazon

And here’s the page for

The FREE Kindle Reader apps

Finally, if you buy the novel and enjoy it, I urge you to post a positive review on Amazon. Your support is deeply appreciated.

Thank you,

Chris Orcutt

When it comes to writing I’ve always been dedicated, consistent and persistent. I’ve also been content to allow the process to take as long as it takes. I “take it easy” by writing first drafts in pencil or on a manual typewriter.

All right...one more hard sell before I "take it easy": Click on the cover to buy my book.

However, when it came to formatting and publishing the Dakota novel, sending out emails and press releases about it, Twittering and “Facebooking” about it, doing interviews with local newspapers about it, replying to gracious fans who bought the novel, checking sales of the novel, reading reviews of the novel, obsessing over a couple tiny typos in the novel, revamping my own website and the Dakota Stevens site about the novel—when it came to all of these things that have nothing to do with the writing itself, I learned that I have only 2 settings: FULL POWER and Full Stop.

Time elapsed between the thought of “Gosh, I really should publish A Real Piece of Work” and launching the book on Kindle? Nine days.

"Easy you must take it."

But now that the novel is out there, it’s not about pushing it and pushing it, and checking on it and prodding it every hour. Or even every day. I need to leave it alone, leave it alone and let word of mouth take hold. “Take it easy,” as my beloved grandfather used to tell me. “Take it easy.”

“You need to think marathon, and not a sprint,” a friend remarks, and I know he’s right. Again, when it comes to the writing, I know I can do that because I’ve been doing it—for 20 years. I know all about the writing marathon. What I’m clueless about is approaching publicity, sales and self-promotion as a distance event and not as a torturous steeplechase that I want to get through in 10 minutes. All I’ve wanted is to reach the finish line and say, “There. Done. What’s next?”

Throughout this publishing and self-promotion process all I’ve wanted to do is get back to the peace and joy of writing something new. Not emailing yet another newspaper with a press release. Not checking to see if “@chrisorcutt” was mentioned on Twitter. Not hitting refresh on my KDP account to see if the book is still selling.

One of my little morning friends.

No, I wanted to cross that steeplechase finish line, catch my breath, shower, change into comfortable clothes, sharpen my Blackwing 602 pencils, sit down at my table that faces the suet feeder where the woodpeckers come every morning, and write.

The thing is, I can do that. I don’t have to obsess about the novel anymore. It’s out there working for me right now without my doing another thing. I could die tomorrow and it will still be out there, selling, and entertaining readers. I can afford to take it eas[ier] now, and that’s what I’m going to do.

I’m going to check my Facebook page every couple of days instead of every couple of hours. I’m going to Twitter less. And I’m going to check on book sales weekly instead of hourly, and perhaps be pleasantly surprised.

All of these social networks and their instant feedback loops are the bane of mild-mannered writers.

The rest of the time, I’m returning to writing, although I sense this transition is going to be as horrendous as caffeine withdrawal. We writers, I’ve noticed, can become horribly addicted to instant feedback mechanisms: email (#1), Twitter, Facebook, online writers’ groups (not my thing), Amazon KDP Reports and Author Central.

And who can blame us? If you do this full-time as I do—working in a vacuum, spending better than half of your life alone—the urge to connect with readers, or even Facebook friends, can be overwhelming once you’ve had a taste of it. I have to keep thinking, “Take it easy. Do a little bit of all of these things, consistently, but over time.”

I have to imagine myself running a race where there is no finish line, because with publishing, promotion and the like, I’m not sure there is one, nor if you’d even want one.

I also think this “take it easy” business can help me approach the other half of my fiction writing career with more patience and steadiness. For 18 months I’ve been submitting a batch of some 25 new stories to all of the top magazines and journals that publish short fiction, and not too long ago the number of rejections that had piled up sent me into a terrible depressive cycle. I’m getting better now, but I know that unless I change my approach to the thing that sent me reeling, I’m destined for another tailspin sooner rather than later.

Here I also have to apply the lesson of taking it easy, acknowledging the incremental progress I have made toward publication in these esteemed periodicals: personal notes from the editors, praise for my work, and the knowledge that, like water on rock, I may be wearing them down.

With both my short fiction and A Real Piece of Work, this concept also comes down to faith. I need to have faith that since I’m putting excellent work out there—the very best I can do—readers will find me, positive reviewers will find me, and the right people who can help me reach more readers will gradually find me. I need to have faith that my stories, with their quality and unique world view, are slowly wearing down jaded editors. And I need to have faith that, by taking it easier, I’m developing the skills of self-promotion that I am going to need in far greater amounts someday when I’m a bestselling author.

Recently, after some mild prodding on my part, Jason posted a review of the book on Amazon, declaring that “I for one hope that the series goes on forever,” and making other lush and laudatory comments about my book. And I’m grateful for all of his praise.

But the thing I’m proudest about has to do with a critical fact about himself that Jason left out. Jason, you see, has read over 1,000 mysteries and thrillers. Think about that: a THOUSAND books in two closely-related genres.

Not Jason's pile, but it does eerily resemble the piles I saw around his house when I helped him move.

He’s the only person I know who has read every single one of Agatha Christie’s novels, all of Dick Francis’s work, all of Chandler, Parker, MacDonald (Ross & John D.), Cain, Le Carré, Fleming, Ludlum, Westlake, Block, Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), and many more. Even I, a writer of this stuff, can’t make this claim.

He’s read over 1,000 mysteries and thrillers by those esteemed authors, and he now ranks my novel, A Real Piece of Work, among the best of them. I can’t describe what an honor this is.

But what makes his review and assessment of my book so meaningful to me is that I know he doesn’t give idle praise. Jason doesn’t do quid pro quo.

If he likes a thing, he says he likes it, and it doesn’t matter who created it; however, if he dislikes a thing, he can be brutal in his criticisms, and again it doesn’t matter who created the thing. For example, one of the subjects for which he became semi-notorious is Wikipedia, and his speech “The Great Failure of Wikipedia,” while perhaps not unassailable in terms of its logic, does a masterful job of raising questions about the information giant—questions that, at the time (2006), no one else was asking.

Obviously I wrote the novel hoping that all mystery readers would love it. But knowing that’s an impossibility, I’ll settle for the praise and respect of the guy who’s read over 1,000 of them.

Here, by the way, in case you’re curious, is Jason’s review of A Real Piece of Work.

A lot of disjointed things that would take too much time and brainpower to construct into a narrative (I want to get back to, you know, writing), so I’m going to present them to you as bullet points:

(NOTE: If you don’t care about this subject and would just like to see a guy—me—pontificate in HD about typewriters for 30 seconds, jump to the end of this post and click the link.)

• The Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) help page is helpful and clear, but it can only help you with those aspects of the project that are intrinsically clear and simple themselves, like entering your bank account information.
• As for the substantive part of the Kindle publishing process—the formatting—sorry, suckah, you’re on your own. Here the help page can’t help you.
• You have to build your own still to make the moonshine that is your book. With its endless stops and starts and workarounds, the process reminded me of the crazy moonshine still that Hawkeye and B.J. have in their tent on the old TV show M.A.S.H. At its best, whatever device you come up with is just a patchwork of four or five programs, and endless tips, tricks and homespun advice from those who have gone before you.
• In my case, I found myself exporting the original book from Apple’s Pages program as an ePub document, then loading it into an invaluable ePub editor called Sigil, then tinkering with the XHTML code, then saving it and loading it and testing it in Kindle’s Previewer (which also compiles the code into a .mobi file), then testing it on a real Kindle, then going back to Sigil to fix the mistakes, and at the end using another program, Calibre, to reconvert the code into a readable RTF (for your own reference), then uploading the final .mobi file to Amazon, testing it on their online “tester” (which in NO way resembles the action of a real Kindle), and praying as I pressed the “Publish” button.
• The biggest pain in the ass, without question, is constructing the Table of Contents and making it link up seamlessly with every chapter and section of your book. Your references to files have to be P-E-R-F-E-C-T; otherwise you’ll get error messages you don’t understand.
• I was glad I took an XML/XHTML course about 10 years ago, even though I had no idea at the time why I was taking it. Without a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and XHTML, a would-be publisher is lost, forced to determine purely by trial and error what certain tags mean and how they affect your document.
• I learned that web pages like this one, which detail the hierarchy and tag nesting structure used in XHTML, are your friends. In fact, they’re the Friday to your Robinson Crusoe; without friends like them, you’ll simply die.
• Maybe this is a trick that programmers naturally use, but I learned to keep separate “revs” of every major change. When I got something to work right, I saved a new rev: “Working_ePub_document_Rev_A”—which in my case went all the way through Z and up to AG before I finished. I did it this way so that I wouldn’t screw up each incrementally better version of the file.
• I learned that, when in doubt, you should proof your manuscript ONE MORE TIME while it’s still in manuscript form (e.g., in Word or Pages). It’s 10x more difficult to make the changes to text when it’s in code format.
• Finally, the award for the Greatest Lifesaving Tip for When You Think You’re Done and the Formatting STILL Isn’t Perfect goes to a very smart guy named David Gaughran. In a masterful little entry on the Absolute Write Water Cooler page, he explains how to fix an issue with indenting that comes up when you think you’re finished: a document looks great on a Kindle, but there’s no indent (or a minimal one) on an iPad. Here is his brilliantly simple, elegant fix.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to get back to writing—on my typewriters. And with that in mind, yesterday my best friend, documentarian Jason Scott, tested out his new camera equipment with me as the subject.

So, if you’d like to listen to me pontificate about typewriters, you’re in luck.

That’s why I wrote them, and that’s why, after running them through the gauntlet of traditional publishing, I finally decided to put them on Kindle. The first one, A Real Piece of Work, is available now.

Okay, that’s the short answer. Now, for those of you who are interested in one writer’s trials and travails, here’s the long answer:

The Kindle Cover for A Real Piece of Work — Design by Elisabeth Pinio

*     *     *

Six years ago, when I began writing the Dakota Stevens series, the only form I could imagine the books taking was, well, books—words printed on paper, bound in hard covers, sold on Amazon and at my local independent bookstore. If someone had told me then that many readers (and more all the time) would be reading on their computers and digital tablets—actually reading, not just skimming emails—I would have said, “Sure, and someday soon Apple stock will be worth over $400 a share. Lotsa luck.”

As it turns out, I was wrong on both counts.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” said Samuel Johnson, but in my case, as much as I may have fantasized about Big Money from my writing, ultimately I did it because I loved the writing itself.

I also loved the private detective genre—detectives including Sherlock Holmes, Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, and Robert Parker’s Spenser—and I wanted to see if I could create a modern detective of my own who could be as real to readers as those other detectives were to me. I wanted to entertain people, engross them. I wanted to give readers vivid, unique scenes. I wanted to give them a woman who, as a beautiful and brilliant chess grandmaster, was unlike any other “Watson” written. And I wanted to give them a detective with FBI experience in the field and the lab, who solved crimes with shoe leather and science.

I have to admit, though, that my choosing to write in the P.I./mystery genre was partly motivated by a false idea I had about the marketplace from reading too many books by “industry experts.” The common wisdom goes like this: Since there is a greater demand for books in the mystery genre, getting a mystery published is an ideal way for new writers to break in and get their other work published. This, I have learned, is mostly bullshit—a pipe dream sold by a few editors and agents who earn a tidy second income writing these books and conducting seminars selling false hope. They don’t want the illusion shattered because then their “How to Get Published in 10 Easy Steps” books and systems are doomed.

What these experts neglect to mention is that because so many writers believe the above “rule,” the mystery market is perpetually glutted with manuscripts, making it that much tougher for yours to stand out. Also, for this reason the dedicated and good-intentioned agents and editors (the majority) are understandably jaded, so that if your mysteries are intricate and well-written but violate the established formula in any way, they will reflexively reject it.

Time and again, both when I submitted to agents and when my agent did to editors, the feedback about my Dakota novels was positive: the quality of the writing, the dialogue, the plots, the scenes, something—but…there was always a “but.” And the maddening thing was, the “buts” always contradicted each other. This agent loved Dakota, but found Svetlana hard to believe. This editor loved Svetlana, but felt she overshadowed Dakota. Or, the market was already “too crowded,” conjuring images for me of swanky soirées with elegant women in strapless gowns, but soirées I couldn’t attend because—that’s right—they were too crowded.

To their credit, most of the agents or editors tried to soften their rejections, assuring me that all good writing eventually finds a home, or, as another one said, “The cream always rises to the top.” This might be true, but not if every agent or editor believes it and uses this belief as a justification for passing on good work. Sometimes I wonder how that particular agent’s career is going; has that agent risen like the cream or stayed at the bottom like the what—curds?

Climbers at the last hurdle on Mount Everest: The Hillary Step. Photo by National Geographic.

Several times—too many times—the Dakota novels came this close to acceptance by a mainstream, name publisher, and once even by a movie studio, who deserves the award for Most Bizarre Rejection of a Literary Property Ever. To this day, I have no idea how one of WB’s production companies heard about me or A Real Piece of Work, but they contacted my then-agent and requested it.

For two weeks, maybe a month, we were on edge. I wondered if this might be the life-changing moment I’d dreamed of. I imagined being on the set, schmoozing with the actors playing Dakota and Svetlana. I imagined a director’s chair with my name and title (Creator) on it. I imagined a lot of nonsense, including whether or not a life in Hollywood was good for a guy like me, a guy with pretty severe bipolar. What if I got into coke? Then again, what if I got to play golf with my idol, Clint Eastwood? What if a lot of things?

Finally, on a cold November night, as my wife and I shivered in our hovel of an apartment, my agent called. In her defense, she was new to her work, so I think making this kind of call was difficult for her; but she was excited when I got on the line, which I interpreted as good news. It wasn’t. Ultimately the producer had read the book and thought it was great. “But,” this person added, “it doesn’t have enough explosions.”

“What?” I said.

“That,” my agent said, “and that it didn’t feel big enough to them. They didn’t see it as a big-budget story. They want a property for an 80 or 100 million-dollar picture. If there were more explosions, they might take it.”

Never mind that I was disturbed that my wholesome Midwest agent was suddenly talking fast like a wheeler-dealer on “the Coast,” slinging out words like “property.” This whole explosions thing and the idea that my novels somehow weren’t big enough made me feel like the artist in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, when a rock star shows up at the artist’s studio looking for some art for his new house. The artist shows him a few paintings and the rock star says, “Yeah, that’s great, but…I’m looking for something big. You know, BIG. (Spreads his arms.) You got anything like that?”

The artist curmudgeonly replies, “I do not sell my art by the yard.”

My kind of explosion: the one from Used Cars.

That’s how I felt. But more than that I was mystified by the producer’s remarks. More explosions? I thought about my novel. Had I written a scene I’d forgotten about?

Nope.

Number of actual explosions in the novel: zero.

Number of opportunities for explosions (i.e., flammable materials lying around, like paint thinner): maybe 2.

She never said so, but my agent clearly had wanted me to revise the book and “throw in” a few explosions. I said if they bought the rights to the book, they could cram as many blow-ups as they wanted into the screenplay, but I wasn’t rewriting a novel that had taken me 3 years to write, adding stuff I didn’t believe in, only to have them potentially say “nah” to the final product.

After that, my agent and I drifted apart. She submitted the second book in the series, The Rich Are Different, and while certain editors expressed interest, again there was always equivocation and qualification attached. As for my agent, I’m not convinced she fought especially hard for the book; by then she seemed focused on nonfiction—fiction forever being a tough sell.

For months afterward, I was bitter, staring at the door that had slammed in my face instead of waiting for the next door to open. I couldn’t understand why, after writing what I knew were very good novels for the genre, I wouldn’t have an opportunity to see them published. It felt like I had wasted years of my life on these books, and all I wanted to do was forget. I was so angry about the time wasted that when I got an email from Amazon about Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), I immediately junked it and spent the next year writing a memoir aptly titled Revenge Fantasies.

It’s at this point in the story that I would have turned to drink. I would have gone back to my old friends: Mademoiselle Beaujolais, Monsieur Pouilly Fuisse, Mr. Sam Adams, Mr. Bushmill, and, finances depending, 18-year-old Mr. Macallan. Would have, that is, if I didn’t totally turn into Mr. Hyde when I drink. I’m glad I stayed away from it.

Instead of drowning my sorrows, for the past 3 years I’ve been focused on becoming the best writer I can, and to hell with genres and the market. Specifically I’ve been writing a lot of short fiction and humor, and targeting the top periodicals for publication. It’s been a steep climb, but I’m making progress and I’ve been enjoying myself while doing it—making it about the writing, and letting the marketplace do whatever it wanted to do.

About three times a year, though, new ads for KDP piqued my interest, including the one where they announced a 70% royalty for writers. Seventy percent! Still, I refused to bite. I was bitter about the entire world of publishing and saw going to Kindle as a copout, a purgatory for writers not good enough to be published on paper, by a publishing house.

A true genius: Vladimir Nabokov. He wrote everything on index cards and his wife, Vera, typed it all.

You have to understand, even though I grew up with technology, when it comes to writing I’m old-school. I write my first drafts in pencil or on one of my 5 typewriters (this entry began on a legal pad). My first job out of college was as a newspaper reporter. Ink on paper. Seeing your name in print every morning or once a week. And getting paid for your skill. Also, I had grown up with books, seen my grandfather read The New Yorker and The Atlantic every morning for 22 years, and I wanted to be in print. All of my idols were: Chekhov, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Chandler, Nabokov, Fleming, Cheever, Carver, Keillor, and Boyle. They all got their start in books, not on screens designed to resemble paper.

But I also know the stories of those writers’ beginnings, and with several of them, had Kindle been an option at the time, I’m confident they would have done it. Chekhov wrote largely for newspapers in his youth—anything that paid while he was going to medical school and working as a young doctor. He would have jumped at the 70% royalty. Hemingway was a shameless self-promoter who had several years in Paris when no American periodicals would publish his stuff. He would have gone with Kindle. Chandler didn’t publish his first novel, The Big Sleep, until he was 49. Had Kindle been available to him, he might have taken it. Cheever had several run-ins with The New Yorker over money; who knows, maybe he would have jumped ship to the new technology as well. And Carver? Raymond Carver and his wife Maryann were destitute and desperate so many times early in their marriage that they surely would have published his work on Kindle, if only to keep the heat on.

But none of that matters. None of those writers wrote for the money; they wrote because they had to and they wanted to be read. Same deal here. If no one is reading your words, writing is just another word for solipsism.

I’d be honored if you bought and read my PI novel. It’s well-researched, well-written, and, well, a good read. And when sales of this first one reach 1,000 copies, I’ll release the second book in the series. But I want you to know that I didn’t do it for the money. I did it to entertain you, the reader, and because I love the process.

 

At the top you’ll find a link to a page where you can learn more about A Real Piece of Work, including its plot and the copious research behind it.

Or, just click here to buy it.

 

WHAT CAN YOU SAY about a 9-year-old girl cat who died?

That she was bright-eyed. And beautiful. That she loved Breyers blueberry yogurt. And Cabot cheddar cheese. And me. That she was finicky, which I viewed as evidence of her refined sense of taste. Once, when I offered her a piece of Jarlsberg, she batted it across the kitchen. My kitty liked her dairy piquant.

I never learned where I ranked among her favorite things—I might have topped yogurt and cheese, but certainly not shrimp nor the summer sun patch by the sliding glass door. Many times, Sweetie was enjoying a sun patch when I called her to come lie on Papa. She appeared to work out an algorithm of the opportunity costs of leaving the warm spot, concluded it was more sensible to stay put, and lay her chin on the floor as final verdict.

We met—that is to say I bought her—in a pet store in ritzy Scarsdale, New York. “Critter Comforts” was the name. At the front near the checkout was a fenced-in display of cats and kittens—rescued feral cats, discovered living underneath a local orphanage. The display was the veritable bargain bin of house cats. A sign offered incentives (shots, food, toys) to buy one of these implicitly inferior animals—ones lacking papers, pedigree, provenance. But none of these things would have mattered anyway; I’m a sucker for the underdog(cat).

It was mid-morning, shortly after feeding time, and the mothers and their kittens were piled atop each other on carpeted perches, smushed against the wire fence. They were all dead asleep—except one: a gorgeous, green-eyed tabby with minute streaks of orange in her gray-black coat and the stripe pattern of a tiger. Unlike most cats, whose faces broaden out as they get older, Sweetie’s always retained its youthful proportions: big eyes and svelte mouth with a paper-white chin. She stood up tall and gazed at me, and as I reached over the fence, she leapt into my hands.

It was my one and only experience of love at first sight.

I walked her around the store, she ensconced in the crook of my arm, shopping for toys and cat accoutrements. I remember buying her a carpeted stump with a hollow den for sleeping. A carrier. Some catnip mice and what would eventually prove to be her greatest recreational activity, the one at which she was an unmitigated natural: Feather-on-a-Stick. (Feather-on-a-Stick included a game I invented: “Bigjump.” Upon my saying “Bigjump” in a sprightly and encouraging tone, Sweetie would jump to ever-increasing heights and claw the feather to the ground. I once measured her jumping prowess with a yardstick and determined that in order to proportionally replicate her feats, Michael Jordan needed to have a vertical leap of 20 feet.)

Of course the five dollars per spare feather was outrageous, later prompting in me an irrational desire to win the lottery so I could start my own feather-on-a-stick company and drive this one out of business, but for the moment all I cared about was showering affection on my new writing companion, so I bought everything—including food and food dishes and brushes and bitter apple deterrent spray—as well as three extra feathers.

The cat was my wife’s idea. It was November 2001. After 9/11, I had taken a voluntary severance package from a Manhattan financial services firm, and with Alexas’s blessing was focusing full-time on my writing. Prior to this, I had wedged writing into my days John Grisham-style: before work, during train and subway rides, during lunch alone in the gourmet corporate cafeteria, during soporific meetings to stay awake.

Alexas had insisted on a companion for me partly because of the long hours I would be home alone during the week, but also because a few years earlier I was diagnosed manic-depressive, specifically Bipolar II. Alexas had read about the therapeutic effects of pets on the mentally ill. Getting a cat, she argued, would soothe my own savage beast by giving me something to care for. (It would also prevent my becoming a solipsist, I added.) And for several years this strategy worked—in the early months especially. Between writing stories and submitting them and getting the mail and burning the rejections and flushing the cinders down the toilet, I had kitten duty to attend to, which included being ubiquitous and forthcoming with copious no’s when I caught her biting on electrical cords or scrunching into dangerously tight spaces.

Since my bipolar meds made me tired—even more so during a depressive cycle, which lasted from two days to two months—I took a nap every afternoon. Having always slept flat on my back, I allowed Sweetie to curl up in the V between my legs. Her naptime was invariably shorter, and within an hour I would be awakened by light, exploratory footsteps on me beneath the blanket that gradually worked their way toward my chest, until her sweet face burrowed out from the covers. She blinked, licked my cheek and curled up, purring—all 2 pounds of her—atop my beating heart.

Feather-on-a-Stick, Bigjump, and aquarium fish-watching were her preferred activities in the early years, although we eventually had to get rid of the aquarium. Sweetie had figured out how to flip open the top hatch, trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to catch herself a snack.

It was around this time that I started to understand the questions and responses implicit in Sweetie’s meows. From the beginning she employed a full palette of cat communication techniques: sharp, plaintive meows with sustained, scolding eye contact (usually used when I had done something wrong, like being away for several hours); bright, contented chirrups; and the calculatedly adorable “silent meow”—used whenever she wanted my attention but knew I was working. Also in her array of subtle tricks were the “tail hug,” wherein she curled the tip of her tail into the crook behind my knee; the clawless paw-tap; the head-bunt; the flop-down; the eraser-bat (she did not like pink pencil erasers for some reason); the quiet stare, which by its unwavering intensity was her equivalent of shouting; and what I termed the “lah-dee-dah”—her brazenly sauntering across my desk in front of me, usually while I stared out the window or at a sheet of paper in my typewriter. Sometimes she even went so far as to walk across the keyboard.

I should mention how she got her name. Easy: the day I brought her home, after I had observed her for hours and noticed her sweet, grateful disposition, I said to Alexas, “She’s so sweet,” to which she replied, “That’s it! Let’s call her Sweetie.” And there you have it.

As with all pet owners, we had our share of close calls. Like the time Alexas and I were standing at our 3rd floor apartment window, which was open and screen-less. Sweetie, spying her first bird in the tree outside, sprung for it. Miraculously, I caught her in midair. After that we never opened a window that lacked screens.

Then there was the D.C. Affair.

Sweetie had been in our lives for two or three years when Alexas’ mother invited us down to Washington, D.C. for a long weekend. I wasn’t comfortable leaving the kitty alone, we couldn’t find pet care on short notice, and I was damned if my precious girl was going to be jailed in a kennel, so we brought her along. Not that this was her first trip. She had gone to the house in Maine, to my sister’s wedding, even to Gettysburg, but something about D.C. freaked her out. (Dubya was in office at the time, so we’ll blame him.) The first day wasn’t an issue because we arrived late in the afternoon, ate dinner, and went to bed. The next morning, however, Alexas and I rose early and took a ferry down the Potomac to Mount Vernon. Sweetie, of course, stayed in the hotel room, where Alexas had set up travel-sized food stations and a litterbox.

When we returned from George Washington’s home, Sweetie was gone. We looked everywhere in the hotel room, scoured the hallways and stairwells calling her name, tracked down the manager, and cross-examined the maid (we had left a prominent DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door)—all to no avail.

Finally, about three hours later, after searching and imagining frightful things, like her being dumped down the laundry chute with the dirty linens, in my greatest Sherlock Holmes moment ever, with Alexas, my in-laws, the manager and the maid rapt before me, I strode to the hotel room window (where I was dramatically backlit), spun around and declared, “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth!” I yanked the mattress off the bed and heaved up the boxspring. There, cowering in a hole in the fabric, was Sweetie. She meowed at me—a half-scolding, half-horrified meow that seemed to say, “Where were you? First you leave me in this little hotel room with no window perch, then you’re gone all day. I’m very upset with you, Papa!” I kissed her and put her in the carrier.

However my and Sweetie’s relationship as Papa and kitty became indelible much earlier than that—within a couple months of getting her.

It was Christmas Day, 2001. The family, including Alexas and me, my parents and younger sister, were spending the holiday at our vacation house in Maine. Two days earlier, a blizzard had cloaked the countryside in a foot of snow.

It’s Christmas afternoon. To give the fire a better draw, my father opens the door to the porch. After a few minutes I notice the door is open and ask, “Where’s Sweetie?” Instantly his face matches the snow outside.

“Jeezis,” he says, “she couldn’t of gotten out! I only had it open a minute or two.”

I go to the door and throw it open. Sure enough, a tottering trail of tiny footprints heads out the door, breaks through the crust on the foot-deep snow, and disappears off the porch. I glance at the outdoor thermometer: 5ºF—scary cold, and if you’re a kitten, deathly cold. It’s three o’clock, which means one, maybe two hours of decent daylight left. Desperate to find her, I run outside in my socks and a sweater.

I knew that adult feral cats were capable of surviving outside in winter, but a 12–15-week-old kitten, alone? Trudging through the snow, I feared the worst, expecting any moment to find her frozen stiff or buried in a deep pocket of snow and suffocated. Her tracks were faint, and a wind was starting to come up, blowing away the loose powder atop the crust. If I didn’t find her soon, I would lose my one and only chance.

Before the wind erased her paw prints, I followed them across our backyard, towards a small gully between our property and the next-door neighbors’. I squatted down and noticed that the snow on the opposite bank was disturbed, like something had clawed its way up. Peering over the bank, I scanned the horizon from her perspective—inches off the ground—and asked myself, “If I were a kitten—cold, disoriented and seeking warmth—where would I go?” The only shelter nearby was a low porch attached to my neighbors’ house.

My family had all gone to the front of the house and were calling the cat’s name, a tactic whose value I questioned, since Sweetie had yet to respond to her name with 100% accuracy. By now my feet were freezing, but there was no time to get my boots. The sun was low in the sky, throwing deep blue shadows across the snow. I went to the porch, dropped to my stomach and crawled partway underneath, a task complicated by my being 40 pounds overweight at the time. I managed to squeeze in about 6’ before my back ran out of clearance. A gray light filtered in from the one side where the snow hadn’t banked against the porch.

“Sweetie? Sweetie, honey, where are you?”

I listened. At first I heard only the wind, but as it subsided I made out the smallest meow. I couldn’t see anything, so I called out again, and she replied again. It was coming from somewhere against the house foundation. I didn’t have a flashlight. I would have to do this solely by ear and feel.

I kept calling to her in the dark and homing in on her cries, which, like a Geiger counter, grew stronger and faster the closer I approached. “Papa, Papa, I’m here,” she seemed to say. Claws were scratching on metal. She was leading me towards one of those metal culverts around a basement window. I groped around, praying I wasn’t about to put my hand into a skunk’s winter nest, reached into the bowl-like hollow, felt a tail, then a wet nose. I pulled her out, backed up and emerged in the half-light with her. She was shivering. I tucked her under my cashmere sweater against my T-shirt with her head sticking out of the neck hole. My father marched toward us clutching a snow shovel.

“You found her. Thank God.”

“Yeah, let’s go in.”

I spent the next hour with her by the fire, bundling her in warm towels. She was completely still, unbothered by being confined. In fact, she purred and gazed lovingly at me until her eyes became heavy. “You rescued me, Papa,” her sleepy look said. “Someday I’ll rescue you.”

She was, by anyone’s definition, a fraidy-cat, something for which I am probably as much to blame as her genetics. Even 9 years later, even after caring for her when we were away, several of my friends and relatives only ever saw her as a dark blur disappearing into a closet. Some doubted that we even had a cat.

The only two people Sweetie was consistently unafraid of were me and Alexas. Since she died, I have learned that in order for cats to be effectively socialized, they need to be around a variety of people and situations—two things that Sweetie did not get in her critical first months. The apartment was quiet, and, with the exception of the clacking of a typewriter or my swearing at a recent rejection, I too was quiet. This meant that whenever we had overnight guests, or if relatives, the building super or the UPS guy showed up, she went into panic mode, stopping short behind me and staring at the door as it opened. Invariably whoever was there frightened her and she would squat to the floor, elongate herself like a ferret and scurry away—a behavior that struck me as a bit off, since plain-old running was far more efficient—to one of her many hidey-holes. Her Alamo? A bookcase bottom shelf, in the hollow space behind some reference books.

Like other cats, Sweetie had her idiosyncrasies, some adorable, some exasperatingly not. For four years after 9/11, I was an adjunct English lecturer at Baruch College in Manhattan. I routinely came home with piles of papers to grade, which I spread out next to me on the bed. Sweetie would join me, and I quickly discovered that she enjoyed rolling around on certain students’ work more than others’. Studying their names, I quickly deduced the common thread: they were my stoners. When I returned the papers, for fun I sometimes called those students aside.

“Go easy on the ganja, folks,” I said, to which they incredulously replied, “What? How…how did you know?”

I never revealed my secret weapon: Super Sweetie.

Some of Sweetie’s other habits may not have been unique to her, but they were no less adorable or annoying. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that says you can’t bathe a cat, from the time Sweetie was a kitten, Alexas and I used a three-bucket system she’d seen on Martha Stewart to wash her. After we dried her in towels, Sweetie retreated to the Alamo for an hour to groom herself and pout, but when she emerged, her coat full and gleaming and redolent of baby shampoo, she strutted back and forth in front of us, basking in our praise: “Oh, Papa, look…look at the beautiful girl!”

Not so beautiful was her predilection for snacking on bugs; disgusting is what it was, but Alexas assured me that “it’s what cats do.” I probably shouldn’t complain, though; her taste for insects may be why I never saw a single cockroach in our apartments. Another habit of hers was annoyingly sneaky, yet for some reason I respected her for it. Before I would acquiesce to give her some “cheeser” or a piece of shrimp, she had to be standing on the dining table rug, not on the kitchen floor. It was still begging, but at least this way I wouldn’t trip over her. While she started out complying with the new rule, she gradually became a living slippery slope, worming her way out half an inch here, two inches there, until only the tip of her tail was on the rug.

“Sweetie,” I’d say.

She’d chirrup in reply, as if to say, “Hey, I am on the rug. See my tail, Papa? See? Now how’s about some of those shrimps?”

By age three, she began to have problems keeping her food down. In other words, she puked—three or four times a day. So much that we had to buy paper towels in bulk. Eventually we had to remove all wet food from her diet. Nothing but the oatmeal of cat food: Science Diet Sensitive Stomach. Vet appointments were useless, the trauma often provoking more puking while yielding no answers as to its cause. There were stomach medications, thyroid medications and more.

When she turned five or six, the Night Crazies started.

From the time Sweetie was a kitten, Alexas and I had let her sleep with us, always without incident. I sleep on my back, with my sock-covered feet sticking out from beneath the covers, and apparently, after years of coexisting with them, Sweetie suddenly found my feet an irresistible temptation. At three o’clock in the morning, she began to pounce on them and bite them. I’m ashamed to admit that I never learned to react with saintly kindness and understanding; instead, I would yell death threats, grab the nearest magazine and chase her out of the room.

Why she did it, I have no idea. She might have been startled out of a deep sleep and seen my long, gaunt feet towering over her (a scary prospect if you knew my feet), or perhaps like her Papa she was having violent nightmares, waking up and lashing out at the nearest threat. Or, maybe she was just bored and biting my feet was the most fun a cat could have at 3 a.m. Whatever the reason, as she grew older this tendency became more pronounced, as did her waking up from naps disoriented and hissing.

Eventually we had to ban her from the bedroom at night, which may have stopped the biting but didn’t change her other night behavior: confused yowling, door-scratching, and growling at things outside. Several times Alexas awoke to see what was the matter and to comfort her, and she never saw what, if anything, Sweetie was reacting to outside. She appeared to be seeing things. Or not seeing them, as in the case of her begging to have food put in her dish when it was already full.

Her increased vocalizing continued during the day, too, becoming so frequent and irritating that several times I snapped at her to “Stop it!” or “What is it?”—as if she could tell me. She also became more clingy, wanting to lie on me every chance she got, and at first I welcomed her attachment. My fondest memories of Sweetie are of my writing in bed and her crawling up to lie on my stomach while I wrote with the clipboard resting on her. She seemed not only content to have to share me with my clipboard and pencil, but I think she took a little pride in her role as clipboard-holder, knowing that she was helping Papa.

Many, many times she saved me, too, hopping on the bed and walking tentatively over to lie on me. It saddens me to remember that there were a few times when I pushed her away. Sweetie could always sense when I was in a depression and would stay close to me for hours, days, weeks. Once, I was lying on my back, staring at the ceiling, seriously considering the best way to commit suicide, when Sweetie crawled on my chest purring, sat down and licked my nose. One could call it coincidence, but I know better. More than once, that little cat was an instrument for higher forces. More than once, Sweetie saved my life by giving me something tangible—herself—to love.

Which is why it broke my heart when the attacks started. One morning after Sweetie had been up all night growling at imaginary threats outside, Alexas mimicked for me the sounds the cat had made, and Sweetie tore across the room towards Alexas. I jumped in front of her, and the cat clawed my leg. Shouting at her, fending her off with a chair like a lion-tamer, I eventually got her to settle down. Later I learned that her behavior was known as “redirected aggression.” She had become riled up by real or imaginary threats, but being unable to attack the interloper, she took out her aggression on us instead.

In my heart I knew that my own mood swings, which are erratic and often unprovoked, had contributed to her perpetual nervousness and tension. More than one person in my life has said that being around me is tantamount to walking on eggshells, through a minefield. So I could almost understand why, after 9 years, she finally snapped and attacked me. Maybe I deserved it. Deciding that it was an anomaly, I forgave her.

Our final morning together began peacefully, like the attack at Pearl Harbor. I awoke at my usual time—5:00 or 5:30—made coffee, wrote, showered and dressed. It was a few minutes before 7:00 when Sweetie hissed out at the patio. The sliding door was open with the screen in place. Sweetie was pressed against the screen, staring and growling at the neighbor’s cat. She had never done this before; neither at neighboring dogs nor cats. I let her drive the animal away, said, “Okay, Sweetie, you won,” then closed the sliding door. Within seconds, she sprang at me, screaming, clawing, biting. She raked my arm, rent my T-shirt down the chest. I threw her off, and she came at me again, this time leaping at my neck. I slapped her in midair, hitting her hard in the mouth (and puncturing my hand on her fangs), knocking her against the kitchen drawers. Momentarily stunned, she poised herself for another attack. I reached for the chair and swung it between us. I shouted at her, she backed away, and I went into the bathroom.

As I cleaned and dressed my wounds, I thought about how ferocious this second attack had been, and my instinct told me something was wrong with her. A wave of nausea coursed through me: I would have to put her to sleep.

What were my other choices? Continue to live with the cat, but in constant fear of another, even worse, attack, and in fear that I would have to hit her even harder next time, when hitting her once had already made me sick? Send her to a “home” for troubled animals, if such a thing even exists? Consult an array of pet therapists? Put her through a long (and expensive) battery of tests, further traumatizing her with stays in hospital kennels, and all without any guarantee that it would restore her to her sweet self?

Observing her behavior over time, it was clear to me that she was suffering from something, or a combination of things, that caused the puking, the nervousness, the hallucinating, the yowling, and the aggression. However, as is often the case in life, the most ethical and humane option was perforce the most difficult one.

Twenty years earlier, I had taken a course on Ethical Issues in Medicine. As an argument in support of euthanasia I posited the idea that in addition to preventing her own sustained suffering, a dying patient has the right to determine how she will be remembered by others. In most cases she would not want her suffering to erode others’ good memories of her. In the case of Sweetie, I felt that she had a right to be remembered by Alexas and me for her beautiful attributes, not for making us fearful in her final days.

I told Alexas of my decision, instructing her not to try and talk me out of it. The pain that clutched my stomach was bad enough to go through once; I wasn’t going through it a second time.

I think Sweetie sensed my decision, but she wasn’t fearful about it. Almost as if to console me for having to make it, she walked over to me and gave me a sustained tail-hug. I lay a hand on her side, and we sat there for some time. Inexplicably, I had the feeling that Sweetie had been trying for quite a while to communicate to me that she was sick and was now relieved to have finally gotten through to me.

On the way to the vet with Sweetie in her carrier, I talked to Alexas about the various options, saying “the egg” instead of the cat’s name because I didn’t want to upset her. Alexas agreed that we had only one choice.

The first available appointment was at 10 o’clock. Still not certain about the decision, I drove to a church, went in and prayed. I felt like an executioner and wanted some sense that I was doing the right thing.

When I opened my eyes, I had the gut feeling, the knowing, that Sweetie was indeed suffering, that she in fact had a brain tumor. Then, at that precise moment, the church bell tolled nine times.

Nine times. Nine lives. Nine years old.

What else I could ask for in terms of confirmation?

The veterinarian spoke with us for half an hour, during which we described Sweetie’s behavior of the past several months. He concurred that there was most likely a brain tumor at work. The kindest thing we could do for her was to painlessly end her suffering. We told him to make the preparations.

When we went into the examination room, Sweetie lay stretched out on a soft quilt that was tucked in around her back to keep her warm. The doctor had administered a heavy sedative, so while she couldn’t move, he said, she could still hear us. He and the nurse departed so we could say our goodbyes.

Before going in, I had made Alexas promise that we wouldn’t break down in Sweetie’s presence. Although the cat was sedated, I knew she would still be able to sense our fear or sadness, and I was determined to make her final moments peaceful. I placed a hand on her and talked softly to her. “Papa loves you, Sweetie,” I said. “Papa loves you.” I told her how much she had meant to me, and I thanked her for nine wonderful years of companionship—years that I needed her more than I ever realized. Several times as I spoke, Sweetie’s muscles twitched; Alexas said this was her way of communicating back to me, and I think she’s right. Then I sang a song to Sweetie, a lullaby I had made up and sung to her when she was a kitten:

I kissed her, then Alexas kissed her, and the veterinarian returned. He gently shaved her back leg near the ankle, found a vein and injected the strong barbituate. Alexas and I stood at the side of the table, tightly holding hands and trembling, but not crying, while the vet checked for breathing and a pulse. There were neither.

We stayed with her for a few more minutes. What I most vividly remember about those final moments is how warm she still was. I pet her belly—something she almost never let me do—expecting, I think, she would suddenly come back to life. She didn’t. I kissed her head for the last time and walked out, leaving instructions with the nurse to donate Sweetie’s carrier to another family.

And then, outside in the warm and breezy summer morning, I did something unexpected, something I hadn’t done since my grandfather died, much less in public.

I steadied myself on the walkway railing, stomped my foot at the gods, and wept.