I did not write the 5th Edition of THIS BUSINESS OF BOOKS.

So I’m doing that one now. This January, 2010. Really. I mean it. Absolutely for reals. I may have to buy an interest in Mars Candy Company to recoup my investment in M&Ms to get through it, but I’m doing it. Right now. Seriously.

For six years now—six years?!  What’s the matter with you? Just write the damn thing!—I’ve promised myself to slam-dunk this revision in a matter of ten to fourteen days. A month at the outside. Six, eight weeks, tops. Definitely within a fiscal quarter.

And for six years—six years?!—I’ve found good reason to not even crack the thing open. I had clients’ work to do. I was backed up on my bookkeeping. It was still selling as is. I had other stuff to write. I didn’t want to self-publish again and I didn’t want to create a proposal. I’d gotten two negative reviews (out of about forty-five or fifty, the rest all positive —so sue me, I’m an author, just like you). Other books had taken its place. I didn’t know what I wanted to change.

I didn’t want to do all that work.

But this year—this glorious 2010 year, this tenth year since we stopped saying “nineteen” and started saying “two thousand” and now say “twenty,” this fantabulous year wherein my husband goes forth with his reinvigorated career, my daughter and her fiancée move to Boston, I sell SECRETS OF A GHOSTWRITER and even find a new agent for HIRED BODIES—this year I’m knuckling down and doing the 5th Edition.

In fact, I’ve already started. Mostly by pretty much catching up on everything else so I have no excuse left, but also by making notes in the margins of my desk copy. I’ve created a new file with a new file name that I can fold, spindle, and mutilate. I’ve collected articles and URLs with important albeit already outdated information. I’ve figured out exactly what I want to change and how I’m going to adjust the cover. I’ve determined the best BISAC Subject heading. I’ve even seriously thought about maybe starting a possible book proposal!

Whew! Is it time to take a break yet?

But no—I slog on. Neither rain nor sleet nor beckoning dirty toilets shall stay me from actually rewriting the obsolete stuff, editing the perennial stuff, updating the transient stuff, and throwing out the rest. The revision-needy text and its accompanying diagrams, tables, and sheaf of amendments sits right here before me, slightly right of my monitor, on the very top of the manuscript pile, obvious, relentless, demanding. I shall persevere. I shall overcome. I shall write the 5th edition.

But as Harry Truman would say: don’t quote me, that’s strictly off the record.

I am a ghostwriter; it’s my job to keep reading. Imagine if I was a literary agent or acquisition editor — I would never have pushed through as far as I did. And in both cases, the fault lay in accuracy; both novelists assured me “this is what really happens.”

Bully. “What really happens” is the stuff of news reports and nonfiction. Not novels.

Novels are fiction; i.e., “made up” or “pretend” or “not real.” People who read novels are looking for a protagonist they can either pretend to be, enjoy reading about, or at least root for. Granted, despicable characters can be a lot of fun to write. Where would fiction be without rapists, murders, and thieves? They challenge the protagonist, create undeserved misfortunes, and provide dramatic tension. But regardless of how much depth and backstory you provide for them, they cannot be the main character.

We have to like the main character.

Got a really juicy bad guy? Great! Set him up to drive an equally enticing good guy nuts. Let that delicious queen of unrelenting evil needle and aggravate the flawed but lovable protagonist princess to distraction. Maybe you’ve got a kamikazi pilot bent on killing as many Americans and Brits as possible–no problem. But either he’s a guy torn between duty and morality or he’s got to go up against an Allied hero. And even if the  hero doesn’t survive, the kamikazi has to somehow lose.

Bottom line: fiction needs to be satisfying; real history seldom is.

So unless you can figure out a way to make them sympathetic or redeeming, don”t offer a rapist, murderer, drug dealer, pimp, hijacker, or (ugh) politician as your protagonist. Flip the story around and make them the villain.

Your readers will thank you.

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