Adventures in Dictation

Shortly before lockdown, I talked to a science fiction author named Rick Partlow about getting on board with his publisher. He said, "Sure, if you have a good indie backlog (I did.) and can spin up stories quickly."

Um...

Holland Bay took ten years to hammer into publishable form. The Dogs of Beaumont Heights, the sequel, took only two because I knew the setting. But it was still a struggle. A trilogy? I thanked Rick and decided science fiction as TS Hottle would remain a not-for-profit venture. There was no way I could spin up a character arc for the mysterious pilot calling herself Suicide. (It's a call sign, based on her penchant for taking risks no one else ever would.) I thanked Rick and moved on. I was at work, took a restroom break. 

By the time I got back to my desk, I had nine story germs spun up in my head. Maybe I could toss these out and make it a trilogy about Suicide and not the seven kids (now adults) from earlier books I'd written. I messaged Rick back. Rick manages a 90,000-word novel a month! I said, "Ass."

"You're welcome."

But how would I make that work? My wife had suffered a major health crisis and needed more attention than before, when she was working and could deal with my man flu. (Spoiler alert: I've only had the flu once since 2002, and my bout with Covid I mistook for a bad cold. Sadly, it hit the same day I got my first booster. That was fun.)

At the time, I drove Uber, but I didn't want potentially sick people in my car. And Uber's isolation practices, when everything was unknown and no vaccines existed, didn't cut it. So I switched to Door Dash. Pick up food, drive to the customer, go to the next restaurant. I also found Rick's secret. He dictated.

Well, I knew these characters intimately. And I'd started outlining more. One reason Holland Bay took so long was that I'd pantsed a story in a fictional city with a cast of characters that would give Dickens pause and a level of detail Tolkien would have balked at. I was trying to write all five seasons of The Wire at one time. Nine science fiction novels? I'd better at least sketch them out.

I quickly developed a system to write while I worked. The restaurants all tended to be in the same location. So I didn't use GPS. Driving to the restaurant or waiting on a run? I dictated the story into Google Docs on my phone. Driving to the customer? I listened to audio books, tolerating the GPS's interruptions along the way. Suicide Run, the original book in the arc, took a month and checked in around 85,000 words (if memory serves.) The longest is the next unreleased book (8 of 9, with a short story collection as a coda), at 92,000 words.  In a year, I managed to dictate the entire story arc of nine novels. 

What did I learn?

It was a weird time, requiring weird approaches. I might have done Holland Bay parts 2, 3, and 4 that way, but somehow, that didn't seem right. Nor did I want to resurrect my PI, Nick Kepler. Kepler is done, anyway. But the arc is not so much a nine-book series-within-a-series as it's a really long story about the seven young people and their mentor in the events following my original trilogy. And if you've read this space for any amount of time, you know I have a penchant for settings and world-building. Probably why Ed McBain appeals to me like he does.