I've been a professional writer since I was a senior in high school (and broke a national news story). But since then, I've aways written short pieces—newspaper and magazine articles, essays, blog posts, poems, short stories, and the like.
I always knew I wanted to publish a book sometime in my future, but I wasn't sure if I could actually write something that... long. And besides, I haven't been able to figure out what the story would be—and where the story would end.
But then in 2022, I answered a call for help put out by The Los Angeles Breakfast Club: It wanted to publish a history book for its 2025 centennial, and it was looking for writers to pitch in.
The club was lucky enough to have a few published authors among its ranks—including me, but also those who'd actually written books before. But in the end, those writers had other things going on in their lives and careers. And I was the last man standing, as it were.It was really the perfect scenario for me: I would be brought on to make the words, but I would be part of a team that would also include Club Historian Rachel Skytt, who would handle most of the heavy lifting when it came to research and crafting the overall narrative of the book.
With someone else to outline the book and each of its individual sections, I didn't have to worry so much about structure—something I'm not really trained on doing when it comes to long-form writing—and could just focus on wordsmithing.
The only original research I'd really have to do—besides some fact-checking and contextualizing based on what was going on in the world and in Los Angeles in the early- to mid-20th century—would be to interview current members who'd been around long enough to remember the club when it was hanging on by a thin strand of bacon fat.
The interviews took up much of the spring and summer last year. Starting in September, the book team—which had grown to include designer Kathy Kikkert—began meeting several times a week to select photos, figure out the narrative, collaborate on the book cover, and start creating and reviewing text.
Having the team meetings—which have grown to three-to-four hours a day, five-to-six days a week—has kept me accountable and motivated. The centennial of the club has given us a sense of urgency that this book has to be done by this year. (Otherwise, it might take another author 10 years to write something like this.)
And to add to the wind in our sails is the fact that the book is now available for preorder.
It's really happening.
It's almost done.
I'm still writing—I've got probably another couple of months of putting-words-to-page left, and then I've got revisions to make. All the while, Kathy is nipping at my heels, laying out the spreads as soon as I turn in my edited text.
It's been really hard—not the writing so much, although there's one paragraph that took several hours and just as many attempts at rewriting before I got it right. But just the enormity of 100 years, of nearly 300 pages, of over 60,000 words and counting. Of trying to parse out the truth when historical events were misreported, names were misspelled, and people lied. Lots of people lied. Others just forgot—and there were no good records kept at the time.
But in some ways, I've been training my whole career for this. I've honed a real skill of being able to take complicated issues and convey them in easy-to-understand, bite-sized pieces—whether that's history, architecture, civics, or health and science.
I've made a lot of sacrifices to make this book happen. But I'll be so happy when I can hold the physical thing in my hands and see my name on it.
The finished books will be available in November. If you'd like to preorder your copy now (either to be shipped to you or for local pickup in Los Angeles), it helps the club pay for the printing (since it's self-publishing the book through its new publishing imprint, MNX Press).
I'm hoping that we can get it into local libraries, too, so that more people can read it.
I think you're going to love it. Even if you've never heard of The Los Angeles Breakfast Club or been to a meeting before. There are Hollywood celebrities, scandals, weddings, funerals, horses, plane crashes, and other batshit crazy stories. And that's just in the first 15 years of the club.
No comments:
Post a Comment