Riding & Writing
Riding & Writing Go Together Like Peas & Carrots
There’s something inspiring about the hum of a big twin engine. . .
The process of writing A Perfect Finish involved a lot of riding. The trip to the Florida Keys and the ride up the Pacific Coast Highway were the bookends. In the middle, I rode to Whitehorse. I spent thousands of miles thinking about the story. I can’t think of a more fun way to have written it.
Exploring the Florida Keys
In April 2022, I headed out from Denver for a ride to the Florida Keys, riding due south through New Mexico to El Paso, and then I tried to skirt along the border for awhile to assess the situation there. That was tedious and inconclusive, so I rode to San Antonio and popped up to Austin. After Austin, I started scribbling some notes about an idea I had from five years earlier, when I visited Whitehorse. Texas is a wide state, and then there is Louisiana, and short snippets of Mississippi, and Alabama before Florida. In Florida I headed straight east and made my way leisurely down the coast. I tried to drop by Mar-a-Largo on an impromptu basis, but they couldn’t find my name on the invite list. By the time I arrived at Key Marathon, I had accumulated piles of scribbled notes.
Hanna flew into Miami and brought me a laptop. We rode around the Keys and hung out for awhile. After checking her in at Miami Airport I returned to Marathon and started writing in earnest, turning the notes into meandering prose arranged in an outline. On the winding road through Graceland (Hanna met me again) and back to Denver I scribbled during the day, generally when I stopped for gas or a break, and processed my ideas each evening. I waited until the day before the Fourth of July barbecue to air my idea about a writing gallivant to Whitehorse. It made perfect sense, so Hanna sort of agreed. I departed on 5 July 2022.
I had discovered the characters and was buffing out their personalities and back stories, but wasn’t able to write any actual Whitehorse scenes because I didn’t remember the place well enough. It’s quite a long ride to Whitehorse. I scribbled notes and processed them each evening. For about a week on the way there, I contemplated the story, worked out some twists, the relationships, and so on. I built a backstory for Alamea that was big enough to fill a prequel as I delayed writing the Whitehorse bit.
Since I hadn’t planned ahead much, the Edgewater Hotel could only accommodate me for part of the summer. I stayed at the Edgewater and wrote there for a couple of weeks, then moved into Denise and Vernon’s Airbnb. For the rest of the summer I wrote there. It was fabulous.
Whitehorse: Striking a Balance
Whitehorse is an adventure wonderland, but I was there to write, so it was difficult to strike the perfect balance of how much to write and how much to explore and interact with the locals. After all, what’s the point of writing in Whitehorse about Whitehorse if one is going to hole up and write all day? I took a daytrip to the Alaska border and back to locate the place of the accident. In August, Hanna started inquiring about when I might return. She held the aces—Broncos season tickets—so I packed up my notes and scribbled and wrote my way back to Denver. The entire trip was a blast; David called it a lark.
To see the riding log for my 37-day, 6,037-mile Whitehorse trip, visit the Alaska Highway Riding Log.
Upon my return, I still didn’t have anything worth reading. I had the beginning and ending written and an outline of the middle. Hanna was kind enough to read through it in rag form. I continued working on it daily, but not as intensely as in Whitehorse. I proposed a trip to Seattle for research and concentration, and Hanna countered that she would manage stuff at the office if I would write from home instead. By September, I had roughed out the missing bits and showed it to Tony and Emma. Their suggestions were immensely helpful. I dropped Alamea’s backstory out of the manuscript, but having written it in such detail, it bled back through living characters. In that way, having built it out so intensely was helpful.
I rewrote various aspects of A Perfect Finish from October to February. I showed it to real editors and a few beta readers who helped me improve my own writing and the manuscript. By March, I had worked some kinks out of relationships and plot and polished it in earnest before releasing it to a final round of beta readers in April. During May I submitted it to literary agents before heading out again. I set a benchmark of earning twenty-five rejections before proceeding to publish it on Amazon.
June on the Pacific Coast Highway
I was done writing. I departed Denver on 22 June 23 to see David and Vicki in Phoenix. From there I headed to Los Angeles and rode up the Pacific Coast Highway to a cliff on the Big Sur. I checked into the Coachman Inn at Carmel-by-the-Sea. I fetched Hanna from the San Francisco Airport and returned to the Coachman Inn. We went to San Francisco then dropped by Sonoma before heading up the coast. The redwoods and coast are wonderful on a motorcycle. We rode the Pacific Coast Highway together through the Oregon Coast. In Portland, Hanna hopped a plane back to Denver in time to do payroll. I continued to the Olympic Peninsula alone. In Seattle, I dropped by the Edgewater Hotel and dined with my sister Diana and Mike at Elliot’s Oyster House. It was all research, of course. I could have charged it as a business expense, but Mike paid for lunch at Elliot’s (ouch).
From Seattle, I headed to Vancouver but, like Steve, couldn’t quite drag myself to go into the Shroom Shop. Instead I took the ferry to Victoria and rode around Vancouver Island. From there I skipped along the Canuck side of the border and crossed the Rockies before dropping into the US, zig-zagging through Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming to arrive in Denver on 15 July 23. It was a 5,631-mile, post-writing, 23-day research gallivant. Upon my return, based on my discoveries in performing the Seattle and Vancouver research, I revised less than ten words of the manuscript.
Luckily, while I was wandering about I received enough rejection letters to qualify for self-publishing. The fact that the agents rejected the concept without reading the story was a disappointment, but not a surprise. I had already learned from beta readers that the average Joe just doesn’t find death to be particularly funny. Months before I had summed it up in correspondence with a beta reader:
Would you please outline which group you feel is your target audience?
Upmarket Fiction. I would love it if this could become a book club candidate, although I must say, I haven’t made a huge effort to revise my style in order to appeal to book club readers. People approaching seventy might especially hate it. As my wife Hanna says, if we create a pie chart of potential readers, documenting which I’ve annoyed with the topic, content, style, and remarks, I’ve eliminated 172% of them. She’s read it several times, and we’re still married, so how bad can it be?
Publishing the Novel
Shaping the manuscript into a document fit to print was more work than I thought it would be. In addition to creating a cover, all the front pages and back pages had to be written, and then there were polishing edits and formatting. When we had a few extra moments, we also bashed together a website. By 27 July 23, A Perfect Finish was ready for print and ePub. Hanna uploaded it to Amazon, Google Play, and Kobo.
That’s pretty much my whole story of riding my way through writing a story. Was I riding to write, or writing to ride?
Go back to: Writing A Perfect Finish