Where the Seat of the Pants Sits by Chester Campbell

Chester Campbell likes to say he was born in the midst of the Roaring Twenties and hasn’t slowed down since. With time off for service in World War II and the Korean War, he pursued a journalism career that included work as a newspaper reporter, free-lance writer, magazine editor, speechwriter for a governor, advertising and public relations staffer, and finally manager of a statewide trade association. He is the author of five books in the Greg McKenzie mystery series and one Sid Chance mystery. He lives in suburban Nashville, where most of his books are set.

 

Where the Seat of the Pants Sits

by Chester Campbell

Kaye says the subject of an author’s workspace has been a popular one. As I thought about that, I wondered does the workspace have any effect on your career? Let’s take a look at the evolution of mine and see what it might mean.

Except for a rather amateurish effort while I was in journalism school, working nights as a newspaper reporter, I wrote my first mystery novel back in the sixties. At that time my home office was a walled-off area in a corner of the garage. I barely had space for a homemade desk to hold my Royal typewriter and a metal two-drawer file. It was smaller than a walk-in closet. I had built the room a few years earlier while writing free-lance articles for magazines. The book was a Cold War espionage thriller, a genre I read avidly during that period. It took a year or two to write. I sent it off to a couple of publishers and one, Avon, kept it for six months before returning it. The editor said he couldn’t convince his colleagues to buy it. Back then I didn’t know the necessity of continuing to submit. I put the manuscript away.

After tearing out the garage to add a den, bath and bedroom, having been blessed by then with two daughters and two sons, I moved my office to the former boys’ room. My desk became a wooden door that rested on two filing cabinets. Though the workspace was adequate, my new job eliminated the concept of spare time, causing me to shelve my fiction writing plans for about twenty years. When I retired from my post as an association manager in 1989, I vowed to get serious about novel writing. Instead of the usual watch, my retirement gift was the rolltop desk I had used at work and its matching chair. I installed them in my home office and began plotting.

Over the next decade, parked at my rolltop desk, I pounded out eight novels, including a trilogy of post-Cold War spy stories and four thrillers featuring ordinary guys caught up in nefarious schemes. I was represented by a succession of four agents who, for various reasons (another story, alas), sold none of them. In early 1998, my wife of forty-five years died of Parkinson’s Disease complications after more than a year in a nursing home. That November I joined my brother and a church group on a tour of the Holy Land. This resulted in a plot for what soon became Secret of the Scroll, the story of a retired Air Force OSI agent’s struggles to save his wife from terrorists after a trip similar to mine.

Thirty or so query letters later, this one landed on the desk of an agent who liked the story but suggested I get a professional editor to help polish it.  This used up a few more months before I could return it to the agent. After another agonizing lapse of time, she replied that she no longer handled fiction but had passed the manuscript on to her husband who was a small press publisher.  He offered me a three-book contract.
This was a career-changing event and came on top of a life-changing event that moved me into a new workspace. In the fall of 1999, I re-married. Sarah and I both had houses, which we sold and bought a smaller but more modern home with a bonus room over the garage. I installed a new wrap-around computer desk that accommodated computer, scanner, and printer, and settled down to the job of being a published author.

Before the book came out, we started the habit of spending a couple of weeks each March and October at my brother’s condo on the beach at Perdido Key, FL.  That gave me the plot for my second Greg McKenzie mystery, about a balcony collapse at a high-rise condo on the beach. I bought a laptop to take on trips and used it to write some of Designed to Kill “on site.”

After publication of the third book and problems in collecting royalties, I acquired a new publisher to continue the series. My workspace underwent a major change around this time. I had joined way too many Yahoo groups and become addicted to things like Facebook and Twitter. Working at my desk in the office, I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time checking email (every twenty minutes of so, an annoying computer voice would say “Mail Truck”), plus wandering about the internet following various links.

We have a pair of side-by-side recliners in the living room. My wife sits by the window in hers and reads or watches TV. My chair on the left has a small table beside it, handy for holding books, notes, cappuccino cups, etc. I took my laptop down to the living room and started doing most of my creative writing there. As a newspaper reporter many years earlier, I had learned to concentrate on writing and ignore all the noise around me. Sarah sometimes complains that I don’t always pay attention to what she says, and she’s right. But the method works. I’m not tempted to stray from the story since I only receive emails on my PC upstairs.

This arrangement has allowed me to complete three more books and about half of a seventh. The current project is the second Sid Chance mystery tentatively titled Good, Bad and Murderous. It came out of the news, dealing with Medicare fraud and a man freed after fourteen years in prison for a murder committed at age twelve. The upstairs office now has a PC, an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax, a laser printer, and an extra-wide printer that will handle various sizes and lengths of paper. I create all of my promotional items there, business cards, post cards, promo folders, etc.

Which leads us back to where we started. Has all that variety of workspaces affected my progress as an author? My editors and colleagues seem to think my writing has improved over the years, but if it hadn’t I’d be following some other line of retirement. How much of that progress can be credited to my workspace may be questionable, but the increase in comfort and efficiency must have contributed something. And writing in a recliner sure comes in handy at nap time.

It's Never Too Late to Start by Chester Campbell

Chester Campbell was born in Nashville, TN in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. When he was a kid, he loved to read short stories in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Liberty. He never thought about writing until shortly before he was discharged from the Army Air Corps at the end of World War II. He was in the first class (1949) to complete the journalism curriculum at the University of Tennessee. The rest, as they say, is history. He currently writes the Greg McKenzie and Sid Chance PI series.

It’s Never Too Late to Start

by Chester Campbell

I can’t believe I’ve been retired for twenty-one years. Come June 30^th , that’ll be the case. The last of many jobs I held, all related in some way to writing, was management of a Tennessee trade association where I edited a bi-monthly magazine. Prior to that I had been a newspaper reporter, freelance journalist, political speechwriter, local magazine editor, advertising copywriter, and PR flack. When I announced my intention to retire from the association, I made it quite clear what I planned to do. Write novels. Unlike some authors I’ve read about, who say their family and friends ridiculed their efforts, I received nothing but support.

All during the Cold War I had been an avid reader of spy novels by Helen MacInnes, Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Ken Follet, Robert Ludlum, and others. When the Cold War wound down about the time I left the workaday world, both the Soviet KGB and American CIA faced either dissolution or serious cutbacks in funding. I used that premise for my first post-Cold War thriller titled Beware the Jabberwock. High-ranking officials of both intelligence services plot the assassination of the Russian and U.S. presidents at an appearance in Toronto.

Several editors said they liked the book but gave the familiar line: “It isn’t quite what we’re looking for.”

That was 1990. Using the same central characters, I turned it into a trilogy, writing The Poksu Conspiracy (much of it set in Korea) and Overture to Disaster over the next two years. All three books required a considerable amount of research, some of it based on my travels in Europe and the Far East. Overture had scenes in Hong Kong, which I had visited, while Poksu made use of my experiences in the Korean War and a visit to Seoul in 1987.

They were fun books to write, but neither sold. I won’t go into my agent problems during this period. Suffice it to say I had several who accomplished nothing. But I stayed at the keyboard (and the library), turning out The Cumberland Caper and The Cambridge Declaration, Grisham-type stories involving ordinary guys who get caught up in conspiracies and are forced to battle their way out.

I also wrote a fictionalized version of a difficult situation one of my daughters found herself in, crafting it in the form of a lecture by a reporter who tells the story. An agent I sent it to found it too heart-wrenching to sell and suggested I might try it as a serialized story in a magazine. By then my daughter had decided she preferred I not push it, so I shelved the idea.

By this time my wife was having serious problems with Parkinson’s Disease, which slowed my writing. When my sisters-in-law came to give me a break, I went on a church seniors’ bus tour to Natchez and New Orleans. I followed that up by writing Hellbound, the story of a similar trip that includes a man who crafted his own false identity after skipping the witness protection program. A Mafia hit squad comes after him and winds up hijacking the bus as a hurricane bears down on The Big Easy.

When my wife died in 1998, I took a Holy Land tour with my brother’s Sunday School class. Out of that came my eighth novel, Secret of the Scroll. This one made it into print in 2002 as the first of a three-book contract with a small press. It came out shortly before my seventy-seventh birthday. Proving you’re never too old to learn, this experience taught me things not to allow in a book publishing contract.

After completing my obligation with Designed to Kill and Deadly Illusions, the second and third Greg McKenzie mysteries, I had problems collecting my royalties and got my rights (and a supply of books) back. I turned to a new micro press formed to rescue authors disenchanted with my old publisher. It gave me more control over things like covers and release dates. Night Shadows Press published the fourth McKenzie novel, The Marathon Murders, in 2008 and will release A Sporting Murder, the fifth, this fall.

Not totally happy with some reviewers calling the McKenzie books cozies (maybe because they feature a senior husband and wife PI team), I decided to try a new series with a little harder edge. The Surest Poison hit the shelves last year. The protag is a six-foot-six single guy who doesn’t mind throwing his weight around. I gave Sid Chance an interesting part-time sidekick, a wealthy former cop who isn’t afraid to use her wiles as needed.

Kaye asked for a photo of my workplace. It’s about as untidy as my daily schedule. Actually, schedule is something of a misnomer. I re-married ten years ago and picked up a grandson, now twelve and living with us, in the bargain. With school and other activities to keep up with, daily (when possible) two-mile walks at the mall, miscellaneous responsibilities like delivering Meals on Wheels, and a variety of chores, no day is alike. I do most of my writing at night, using my laptop in the living room. The office is mostly for the business end of the business. 

With piles of manuscripts on the floor, including a few unpublished ones that I still believe are salvageable, and soon-to-be six published books on the shelf, I’m quite pleased with the way retirement has shaped up. It would’ve been nice to have started a bit earlier, but I’m looking forward to getting my second Sid Chance mystery and my seventh published novel out in my eighty-fifth year. I feel like I’m just getting started.

Chester Campbell - A Writer by Fate

Chester Campbell was born in Nashville in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. As a boy he dreamed of roaring off into the wild blue yonder, but you'll find out below the fate of that dream. He has been writing for more than sixty years in areas such as newspapers, advertising, speeches, public relations, magazines, and mystery fiction. He lives in Madison, TN with his wife and an eleven-year-old grandson.

A Writer by Fate

Unlike many of my fellow authors, I didn’t know I was going to be a writer from the time I first learned what those squiggly lines on the page were all about. Though I enjoyed reading suspense/adventure stories in The Saturday Evening Post and Liberty magazines as a teenager, I never gave a thought to writing anything myself.

My circuitous trek through the literary landscape began with one of those random quirks of destiny. I graduated from high school in 1943 when things were getting pretty ugly in Europe and the Far East. After flunking the Navy’s pilot trainee physical (underweight), I beefed up with bananas and milkshakes made with raw eggs—Salmonella being a foreign term back then—and passed the Army Air Corps exam. But they wouldn’t call me to active duty until I was eighteen at the end of November.

By the time I got into the Aviation Cadet program, they didn’t need as many pilots or bombardiers or navigators, so they shuffled us from one base to another like pawns on a chessboard. Stationed at Randolph Field outside San Antonio near the end of the war, I worked with another cadet who had spent a year at Yale before going into the service. One day he told me that if he had it to do again, he would study journalism. For some reason, that resonated with my psyche. Maybe it was like my mother always said, “If Chester’s going to do anything, he’ll have to do it with his head because he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty.”

After my discharge from the Army, I joined many of my buddies in signing up for college under the GI Bill. My research showed journalism schools were typically junior and senior programs. I enrolled at the University of Tennessee, intending to transfer after two years. Fate intervened again, and by my sophomore year, UT had instituted a reporting course. The associate editor of The Knoxville Journal, a morning daily, took a year’s sabbatical to teach it.

The following year, a full journalism curriculum was added, and the editor invited a few of us to come to work at the newspaper. It was a good source of cheap labor, since we were only allowed to make a minimum amount and stay under the GI Bill. But I got both a formal education and invaluable on-the-job experience. It was during this period, in 1948, that I read Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and No Pockets in a Shroud. Both involved murders. No Pockets dealt with a newspaper reporter.

While going to school fulltime days and working fulltime nights, I sat at my little portable typewriter in the basement of my fraternity house in spare moments and banged out a murder mystery. It featured a reporter solving a murder case. I’d like to say it was published and I became a big success. But I don’t like to lie. For me, publication didn’t come for another fifty-four years.

The path of my writing career wriggles like a snake. I left The Journal in 1951 to go on active duty with the Air National Guard, winding up in Seoul as an air intelligence officer in the Korean War. Back home in 1953, I signed on as a reporter for The Nashville Banner. I followed that doing publicity for the local mayor, free-lanced a bit for national magazines, and wrote speeches for the governor.

After that I started Nashville Magazine, a slick paper monthly, which was a bit ahead of its time. After nearly seven profitless years, I moved on to writing advertising copy and another stint at public relations. I wrote a Cold War spy novel in the sixties, which languished with a New York editor for six months before he gave up trying to sell his colleagues on buying it. I didn’t know I should have kept sending it out.

The last eighteen years of my business life were spent as a trade association manager, responsible for, among other things, putting out a bimonthly magazine. On approaching retirement, I told everyone I would write novels when I departed the business world. And write I did. Starting in 1990, I turned out a book a year for several years, mostly post-Cold War thrillers. My experience with agents during that period is another story, but suffice it to say nothing sold.

My writing slowed when my wife’s Parkinson’s Disease worsened. She had a bad surgical experience and went into a nursing home. After her death in 1998, I took a Holy Land tour that led to the writing of Secret of the Scroll, my first Greg McKenzie mystery. I got a three-book contract from a small press, and the eighth book I had written since retirement was published in 2002. It was a long apprenticeship.

After writing two more for Durban House, Designed to Kill and Deadly Illusions, I switched to Night Shadows Press for the fourth McKenzie book, The Marathon Murders. My first Sid Chance mystery, The Surest Poison, will be published by Night Shadows in April. Both series feature Nashville PIs. The McKenzie books deal with a couple in their sixties, an age group I feel notably qualified to write about.

If I have any claim to fame, it’s that I stand as a shining example of the value of persistence. I had rejections galore and unproductive agents to spare, providing ample opportunity to chuck it all along the way. I never thought of quitting. Since those early days at UT, I’ve considered myself first and foremost a writer, and I expect to continue it until they slide me into the incinerator.

If you’re game for a more lengthy version of my sixty-year odyssey with the written word, you’ll find it under “Reflections on My Writing Life” at http://www.chesterdcampbell.com/Reflections.htm