E________, first draft: 70,800 words
I like to think that, when it comes to thinking, I’m a forward-thinking guy. And flexible. I write stories about the future but can also put out a good old murder mystery like A Quiet Teacher, which is heading pell-mell toward publication.
Unfortunately, the reality is that I’m not so much forward thinking as irredeemably backward, a swivel-eyed triceratops stampeding in panic along the information superhighway: a metaphor that, on reflection, only serves to illustrate just how dinosaurial I am. Who says “information superhighway” anymore? To make matters worse, the industry that has exposed me as a living fossil is not high finance (my day job is in financial counterterrorism) but book publishing, which, let’s face it, is hardly a byword for the cutting edge.
I’m a living fossil, it turns out, because when I think of book publishing, I think about, well, books. Hardbacks, posh paperbacks, less posh paperbacks. Spines, cracked (ick!) or otherwise, the rustle of pages, the serried ranks of carefully formatted lettering. Books.
I do know that there are such things as e-books. I even own an e-reader. But I rarely use it. For reasons that I can’t fully fathom, anything I read on an e-reader doesn’t seem to stick. I can re-read a book I bought decades ago and bits and pieces will start to come back to me as I turn the page. But an e-book I bought last year? Crickets, so far as my memory is concerned.
My true blind spot, though, the thing that makes me a complete dinosaur, is audiobooks. What I still insist on calling books on tape. My wife does almost all her “reading” this way, her iPhone feeding book after book after book into her wireless headphones as she potters about the house. I, on the other hand, one: still own headphones with wires; and two: had never listened to an audiobook until I received my complementary copy of Braking Day from the publisher. It’s simply not a habit I’ve ever picked up. If I see someone looking at a kindle, I’m sufficiently with-it to know they’re reading a book. If I see someone wearing headphones, I assume they’re listening to music.
And yet. Roughly 10% of all books sold today are audiobooks. Worldwide, audiobooks account for more than four billion dollars in sales and sales are expected to grow at a rate of more than 25% a year through 2030. I haven’t done the math, but that’s a lot of books. Audiobooks, it appears, are the future.
A fact of which I remained blissfully unaware until recently. Perhaps, if I had been more aware, I wouldn’t have written A Quiet Teacher quite the way I did.
A Quiet Teacher is a murder-mystery set in an upscale American high school. Owing in no small part to the main character’s backstory, there are a number of characters who speak English as a second language or are far too educated for their own good. As a result, Dr. Google and I had a great deal of fun peppering the manuscript with Russian, and German, and a little bit of Latin (the Latin is very, very rude, by the way). The Latin is all me (I’m a dinosaur with a dinosaur’s education after all) but I can’t speak Russian or German or any other living language to save my life.
Which didn’t much matter until last week.
Last week, Susan, the rights whiz kid at my agency, got in touch to talk audiobooks. Who would I like to narrate A Quiet Teacher? Oh, and by the way, here are some options to consider.
Feeling like a pretend Hollywood bigshot, I reviewed a number of audition tapes (they’re computer files now, of course) and settled on an awesome actor to do the reading. He has a great voice, can do a variety of accents, and his delivery is spellbinding. Even though I am not an aficionado of audiobooks, I can’t wait to hear the finished product.
Job done, I returned from my virtual visit to the movie industry and knuckled back down to the writing of E_________, which, thanks to the horrors of Ukraine and the resultant sanctions, is well behind schedule. My schedule, admittedly, but I hate missing deadlines, even if they’re totally made up.
So, I’m typing away when another email from Susan pops up. Could I please go through the book and prepare a list of unusual words with an accompanying audio file demonstrating how I’d like the words pronounced? Also, can I do it by August 26?
No problem, says I, once again abandoning poor E________ for a more pressing task. E________, when it grows up, is going to have daddy issues. I start going through the proof of A Quiet Teacher, making an index of words and their page numbers for inclusion in the file.
And then it hits me. There are a lot of Russian words. And some German. And I don’t know how to pronounce any of them! Why did I write them in the first place? Why couldn’t I just stick to good old English? Why did I not remember that audiobooks are a thing? There was no need for all those fancy foreign words. No need at all. Pretentious old coot, that’s what I am.
And now, continuing to be pretentious by quoting Vladimir Lenin, no less, “What Is To Be Done?”
I have no freakin’ clue.
So, here I am, a swivel-eyed triceratops stampeding panic-stricken down the information superhighway, leaving giant, steaming, dinosaur-sized droppings as I go.
A dinosaur hoist by its own petard.