Marti  | Behind the Scenes

About the Beginning

The idea for this novel concept, one written from a male’s perspective, originated years before Marti was ever conceived.   I conceptualized a novel entitled But You Can Call Me Doug that would have been written in first person and entailed the life of an arrogant, smooth-talking Black man, who thought he knew everything there was to know about life and the world around him.  Some, I would say, ten years or so later, on January 25, 2002, while comfortable in my bed, my back resting again the headboard and laptop in my lap, after all, it is a |lap∙top|, I began to write the story of Marti, not even that, more like three or four pages, which after some later tweaking turned into about seven single-spaced pages with the original title: A Little Bit About Everything, A lot About Nothing.  And that was it. 

I didn’t pick the novel back up till almost a year to the date that I had begun the original draft.  Honestly, I had no real plans for the novel, it was just a challenge more or less to see if I could write the book at some point, no time constraints, nothing.  Anyway, in 2003, I began to develop an outline for the book.  And, as I learned it to be the case with other authors, I had envisioned the ending before I knew the middle.  I knew how I wanted the novel to end, the real challenge was the delivery and progression of the novel: what conflicts were there?; how would conflicts be resolved?; would there be an underlining message presented as subtext?--all these questions had to be answered.  By the end of 2003, I had developed the chapter outline, written the contents for most of the - at the time - thirteen-chapter novel.

Then something in me snapped around February 2004; for some reason I had to get my novel out there.  What needed to be polished in the manuscript I did with a sense of urgency before I began sending it off in search for an agent who would represent me and my nearly 35,000-word novel and shop the manuscript around to be picked up by a commercial publisher. 

That month I began to send the novel out to several agents, and found an agent that had taken the time to evaluate my manuscript, praising me for my ability to deliver a novel that “left nothing to the imagination” and was believable, “playable,” well-conceptualized, but whose writing was lacking “commercial panache.”  They offered to represent my work, under the condition that I use their services to line edit my manuscript with a $4500 price tag to boot.  What they didn’t realize is that they only fueled me for what I knew I had the ability to do myself.  I used the entire month of March and the first of April to line edit my manuscript, further developing the story and the characters, and again attempted to shop the novel around, finding a smaller publishing house willing to review what I had written.  Still, I received more constructive criticism; there needed to be more, gaps needed to be filled, characters needed more development.  So, I spent the rest of year 2004, into year 2005, periodically addressing issues that needed to be resolved in the novel, further developing my story, rearranging content, making the manuscript more concise.

What started out as a thirteen-chapter novel, had now been lengthened to 38 chapters, included a prologue and an epilogue.  At 81,000 plus words, I was finished telling my story, and the rest is history…