Why I had to write this book twice
Imagine yourself sitting down to write a book. You decide that the ideas and words flow better when you hand-write, so you buy a few legal pads and get your outline, notes, and coffee prepared, and you get to it. Months go by, as you fill up page after page with just the book you intended to write. Any free moments you get are filled with intensive writing sessions, and you are starting to see the finish line.
That was me in 2005, as I was deep into writing “One Summer in the Minors” for the first time. I had recently started dating my wife, Virginia, and we would go on coffee dates to Starbucks where she would read and I would write, occasionally pausing for some casual conversation. I would read her passages from my manuscript, and gauge her reaction before deciding if it was keeper material or not. Usually, it was. I was sitting in the driver’s seat, cruise control turned on, and I was heading smoothly toward the finish line. I had completed about 80% of the book, and I was eager to get it out into the world.
Right about the same time I was eyeing the finish line, I started a new job at a software company called webMethods. I was assigned a new laptop and bag on the first day, into which I also put my manuscript so that I could pull it out and work on it during lunch and breaks. One day during my first week on the job, I drove home to briefly change before a date with Virginia, leaving my laptop bag in my locked car for about ten minutes. I came out to find the back slider window on my pickup truck pried open, and the laptop bag with my new company-issued laptop plus my manuscript inside. Heartbroken doesn’t quite capture how I felt in that moment, as my head spun while trying to grasp that my baby was stolen, and also figure out how to explain to my new boss that I’d just had a brand new IBM laptop stolen. Surely he’d think I pawned it or pulled some other kind of scam. Fortunately, he and the company were understanding, though the company did make me provide a signed statement and provide a police report before the matter was settled.
Though my job was intact, I still had to deal with the anguish of wasting months of work. I felt stupid for being a dinosaur and not writing it on a computer and backing it up thoroughly. I was angry at whoever stole it, even though I left a sign on my slider window that read, “PLEASE KEEP LAPTOP, RETURN NOTEBOOKS INSIDE BAG. THEY ARE WORTHLESS TO YOU.” I left it on the back of my truck for three weeks, actually hoping that the thief would return for another round and somehow find some heart. It didn’t work, nor did I expect it to, but it was worth a try.
It took me a long time to get the desire back, to retrace all of those steps I had taken that had gotten me so close to finishing my first book. Twelve years to be exact, and I am happy that it did. If I had started earlier it would have been forced, and I wouldn’t have found the right joy in the process. But I waited until a true sense of anticipation had come back, and I found that the words flowed as they did the first time around, but I had worked out a better outline for the book and distilled my outline into much better work if you ask me. My first attempt was different in many ways. It was much more detailed but in a way that would have made it appeal to a smaller crowd, and it was also kind of gonzo which doesn’t feel like the right approach for a first book. And it was too hardcore inside baseball so it would have lacked appeal with the casual reader. I did handwrite this version too, but I captured pictures of every completed page on my cell phone and backed them up in the cloud.
In the end, the right book was written to completion because, after all, everything does happen for a reason. But it’s a lesson that I am determined to only have to live through once.
