Disturbing Reports From the Land of Fantasy

It was a hot topic not too long ago, especially in white-collar Orange County, but you don’t hear or read much about the mid-life crisis anymore.

You still see signs of it all over Orange County, however: men with new hair implants shopping for Porsches, women with wedding-ring grooves trying on clothes from the New Wave rack.

The sags, the wrinkles, the new hair appearing on the shoulders, the old hair disappearing from the head--these are enough to spawn the anxiety. But it takes a sense of futility on the job to get a crisis really rolling.

I’d guess that no job is so good that it is immune to mid-life ennui. County supervisors, who spend their days in Santa Ana being pampered by county employees, eventually must yearn for a remote Pacific island--where they can be pampered by natives. Rich Newport Beach housewives eventually must want to move to a garret, write a novel and live the hard life, doing their Neiman-Marcus shopping by mail.

It seems that writing the novel is at or near the top of the list of romantic escapes, regardless of the occupation of the escapee. Stockbrokers and janitors and fry cooks who haven’t read a hardcover novel in years, who can’t type, who never write letters, can envision themselves before a battered Underwood.

Oddly enough, experienced professional writers--notably newspaper reporters--often have the same dream. Though cynical from years of interviewing city council candidates, they dredge up the same fantasy when mid-life crisis time rolls around.

They? Well, we, actually. But I’ve come to my senses, and I know exactly when I did: Monday at around 11 in the morning.

I had thought that I might have a novel or two in me, so I queried an old newspaper acquaintance who lives in Laguna Niguel--a reporter who had quit his job, written a spy novel set in Irvine and sold it to a big league hardcover publisher. He had done what all us office drones dream of doing.

I asked him how you go about selling your first novel. I assumed that you can sell any novel that is based on a good idea and is well written.

“Most publishers will not even look at a manuscript that comes in over the transom,” he said. “Most of them won’t take an un-agented manuscript. There are, I’m guessing, under a hundred good agents in the country in the book publishing field, and they probably are not going to be quicker to take unsolicited material than the publisher is. They’ve got more than they can handle already.”

But once you’ve sold it, you’ve got it made, right?

“The average advance is $5,000--swallow hard on that one. And most books never earn back their advance--first novels, particularly. And they don’t sell paperback like they used to, either. It used to be any ‘commercial’ book was probably going to go to some reprinter for paperback, but they’ve cut way back on their production as well.

“As a result, in the commercial fiction field--mine is the mystery-suspense field--lots of books don’t even get sold for reprint. It’s a library run of 5,000 hardbacks.”

But if it’s a good novel, won’t the critics rave and make it a best seller?

“You can’t get reviewed. Just before I left my job at the paper, I saw the proceeds of only one month of books destined for the reviewer of mystery-suspense. This editor showed me the shelf that he uses to store the books he thinks the reviewer might want to consider for his reviews. It was five feet of shelf space, and that’s only the ones that looked promising. And that’s just one genre within the field.”

So how do you get noticed once the book is published?

“I’ve heard that as little as 20,000 hardback sales will get you on the New York Times best-seller list, so long as those 20,000 sales are in the right bookstores--the ones that are sampled by the New York Times.

“There is this wonderful story of a writer in Los Angeles whose book kind of came out of nowhere and got on one best-seller list. Then about eight months later he died of a sudden heart attack, and they went to clean out his house and they found eight thousand copies of his book.

“There’s a certain logic to it, because if you hit somebody’s list, you get paperback reprint sales. That’s where the money is, not in the hardback advance. Every writer does something like that to help his book along. You go into a bookstore, and if your book is not there, you ask for it. If your book is on a shelf with 20 other titles--and two of those titles are face-out and the others are spine-out--you make sure that yours is one that’s face-out. I have family all over the country doing shelf dressing.”

I could feel the romance of writing novels begin to wilt. This sounds discouraging, I remarked.

“Well, if you want to write a novel that gets published, write it for money,” he said. “Don’t write a novel to be on a talk show, and in the present market, don’t do it to send a message. You do it because that’s what you do for a living--you write.”

But I write now.

“That’s right. And you’re getting a bigger paycheck than I am, too.”

Jeez, I said, can I buy you lunch or some groceries or something?

“No,” he said, “I’m luckier than most. I’ve got a wealthy wife.”