Second Chances by Gabriel Valjan

What single moment of being a published writer has been the most memorable?

 

I’ve enjoyed many memorable moments as a published writer, from nominations that I never thought would come my way, to invitations to moderate panels and contribute to anthologies, to meeting Walter Mosley, BUT I think every writer would agree with me and say that seeing their first book the first time is an indescribable accomplishment. It’s your firstborn, your book baby.

           

Which is why I’d like to shift the emphasis of this post from first to second chances.

           

Today marks the rerelease of THE GOOD MAN. The rights had reverted back to me, and I faced a decision, either to shop it with publishers interested in orphans, or self-publish it. That books 2 and 3 in the Company Files series were nominated for Agatha and Anthony Awards nudged me to approach Level Best Books about adopting the series. I didn’t want to lose that momentum. There is another reason. The novel was not the first novel I had written, but memorable for several reasons.

           

THE GOOD MAN has had an interesting history. The majority of agents liked the writing but, for a variety reasons, passed on representation. One particular agent objected on the plot’s implausibility, and then followed up with a second email to say it was morally offensive. Sigh, as if I didn’t hear no twice. When I was writing the novel, the Jason Bourne franchise was popular, and I wanted to offer readers a throwback to traditional espionage and suspense from the likes of Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, Graham Greene, and le Carré. I’d grown tired of relentless action scenes in the Mission Impossible and Jack Reacher films, and I never liked the crutch that tech and gadgets offered characters. The sexual conquests of a James Bond seemed dated. If Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb had existed then, I’d say he was my idea of a spy.

           

Readers familiar with the film The Third Man will recognize the setting, though I hope I draw them deeper into the unknown histories of postwar Vienna and the early days of an American intelligence agency. Survival required a chess master’s skill to know all the players and their pieces on the board.

           

Write what you know, and what you don’t know, you research.

           

I chose as inspiration for the novel, the declassified Operation Paperclip. The details fit my need to avoid any reliance on technology, yet it spoke to the era, the Cold War, and to the technological legacy we enjoy today. Operation Paperclip was the CIA’s effort to recruit former Nazis for any competitive edge over Russia, our former ally during World War II. The ‘human element’ within my novel was how naïve we were in dealing with former enemies, and how the US turned the inevitable but convenient blind eye once identities were unmasked.

 

Deals with demons made, our national integrity was both compromised and tainted. There was no way at that time to do deep background checks on every individual. Like kids who lied about their ages to join the war effort, Nazis lied about their complicity in genocide and war crimes. As for the payoff—a single cell phone’s computing power far exceeds the capability of anything NASA used to put a man on the moon    

Most novelists don’t knock the ball out of the park with their first novel. I’m no exception. Writing the novel was a massive learning curve. My overall pacing was fine, though many paragraphs suffered from what I call The Raymond Chandler Curse, aka an overuse of similes, to the point of parody. I worked with line editor extraordinaire Dave King to rein in my own exuberance. I still advise authors to keep a copy of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers on their shelves.

 

With my first publisher, I worked with two editors who each had very different approaches to editing. I did the best I could at that time, as did my publisher, but we were both learning the industry. My knowledge about marketing was almost nil, I had no access to other writers for blurbs, and my social media presence at the time was primitive. THE GOOD MAN died a quiet death.

           

A second chance via Level Best Books today returned me to a moment in time, with the notable exception that I have more of an author and social media footprint than I did years ago. The editor’s hand was consistent from first to last page, and it reappears with attractive cover art.

           

Thank you, Level Best Books, and here’s to a second life.