It may be the Fourth of July\u2014Happy Birthday, America!\u2014but it\u2019s also Wednesday and time to write this week\u2019s post.<\/p>\n
I arrived in Seattle from Phoenix on July 2, 1981, driving a 78 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Brougham with my two kids in the back seat and a U-Haul trailer that was hitched to the back.\u00a0 Packed in with all our worldly goods in the trailer was my dream of becoming a writer.\u00a0 Less than a year later, in March of 1982, I sat down to write my first novel.\u00a0 Fifty plus books later I can truly say that I\u2019m living that dream.\u00a0 Next week, however, when I\u2019m in NYC for ThrillerFest, I\u2019ll be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by Strand Magazine.\u00a0 One of the other Strand honorees this year is Michael Connolly, so this is truly an honor.\u00a0 Although, considering I was 38 years old when I started writing and am 74 now, I\u2019ve only been writing 51.3% of my life\u2014just a tiny bit over half, so maybe the good folks at Strand round up.<\/p>\n
It should be a memorable event.\u00a0 After the award cocktail party on July 11, Bill and I will be hosting folks from both my publishing houses for dinner. Visions of a banquet with the Montagues and the Capulets come to mind, but I trust the dinner will be fun, too.\u00a0 Growing up in Bisbee, New York City as a sophisticated, exotic place.\u00a0 I still can\u2019t quite believe that I get to be part of it sometimes. In my heart I will always consider Arizona my home, but Seattle will always be my creative home because this is where I finally gave myself permission to live the dream.<\/p>\n
When I\u2019m out on the road, people often ask if I keep a notepad on my nightstand so I can jot down ideas that come into my head overnight.\u00a0 My stock answer to that is, \u201cNo, I don\u2019t.\u00a0 If the idea isn\u2019t good enough to last until morning, it isn\u2019t a good idea.\u201d\u00a0 What started me on that path, of course, is that before the miracle of Lasik I was blind as a bat without my glasses\u201420\/850 and 20\/900.\u00a0 So locating my glasses as well as a pen and paper in the middle of the night just didn\u2019t work for me.\u00a0 In other words, I didn\u2019t get into the habit of doing that to begin with and see no reason to change over to some other system at this point in time.<\/p>\n
What about dreaming books into existence?\u00a0 Nope, dreams don\u2019t work for building books.\u00a0 Thinking builds books.\u00a0 Early on, the kids were uneasy when I sat staring into space without saying a word.\u00a0 My position is it takes about twice as much time spent thinking to write a book as it does time spent keyboarding.<\/p>\n
But that doesn\u2019t mean that dreams aren\u2019t part of the writing equation.\u00a0 As I was finishing writing Field of Bones, for example, one of the characters from the book appeared in a dream and we had a long, interesting conversation.\u00a0 That had never happened to me before in my whole life.<\/p>\n
Sometimes book tours surface in my dreams, where I miss a flight connection and get locked out of my hotel room while wearing only a robe.\u00a0 The latter actually happened to me once, when I was sitting out on my patio at the Arizona Inn in Tucson, reading my paper and drinking my coffee.\u00a0 Who knew that as soon as you closed the door, you wouldn\u2019t be able to open it again?\u00a0 I had to call the front desk on my cell phone and ask them to send a bellman.<\/p>\n
This week I had another book tour dream.\u00a0 I was on my way to do an event \u201con the other side of Ajo.\u201d\u00a0 To my knowledge, there isn\u2019t anything between Ajo and Yuma but \u201cthe other side of Ajo\u201d is where I was heading.\u00a0 When we got to Ajo, most of the town had been wiped out by \u2026 wait for it \u2026\u00a0 a Tsunami!\u00a0 Who says dreams have to be logical?\u00a0 The body of water closest to Ajo would be the Gulf of California, and that\u2019s a very long distance to cover.\u00a0 Nonetheless, instead of going on to the signing, Bill and I stayed on to help dig people out of the mud.<\/p>\n
But writing about the dream just now, reminded me of my time as a District Manager with the Equitable in Phoenix.\u00a0 A lady came to work for me, claiming to be a CLU\u2014a Chartered Life Underwriter.\u00a0 She filled out the forms, I turned them in, and\u2014mistakenly\u2014assumed that someone in the home office would do some kind of background check.\u00a0 She came on board with the potential for a \u201cbig book of business.\u201d\u00a0 She had a very wealthy and most likely certifiably nuts prospective client named Frank who wanted to turn Phoenix into a seaport by building a canal from the Gulf of California to Buckeye.\u00a0 That never happened, and the book of business never showed up, either.\u00a0 Then, one day at lunch, my newbie agent happened to mention something about being a Certified Life Underwriter.\u00a0 Hello.\u00a0 Accountants earn a CPA designation\u2014Certified Public Accountant\u2014but for life insurance folks a CLU is CHARTERED LIFE UNDERWRITER!<\/p>\n
I went straight back to the office, found a copy of her job application, and did some checking of my own.\u00a0 It turned out that not only was her \u201cCLU\u201d bogus, so were all of her references.\u00a0 I fired her that very afternoon.\u00a0 As I write this, I wonder whatever became of her.\u00a0 She was an older woman who claimed to be a widow.\u00a0 That may or may not have been true as well.\u00a0 And I wonder whatever became of Frank.\u00a0 I can tell you for sure that he never bought insurance from me or any of my other agents.<\/p>\n
Most of the time, my dreams are entirely forgettable.\u00a0 They disappear into the ether within moments of waking and are gone by the time I make it to the coffee machine in the kitchen.\u00a0 This time the dream has stayed with me, and writing about it just now brought back a memory that I hadn\u2019t thought about in twenty-five or thirty years.<\/p>\n
So the old gray cells are still working away, and to quote another song from the Fifties, Memories are Made of This.<\/p>\n
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