The Missing Character From My Second First Novel

The death of O.J. Simpson this spring was a tragic loss for true-crime lovers. Now that “The Juice” is gone, who will pick up the search for the real killer of his ex-wife and her “friend” Ron Goldman? Probably no one. We’re all so busy these days with trivial things, the “getting and spending” that William Wordsworth complained about in his poem “The World is Too Much With Us.”

 

I know it’s not going to be me, because I’m busy on a quest of my own: to find the missing character from my second first novel.

I say “second” first novel because my first first novel “fell stillborn from the press,” in the immortal words of David Hume, and so after my second novel came out I decided to do a little “re-branding,” as the marketing people say; I changed the title and got new cover art so the shame of having written a debut that was a dud was buried in a shallow grave, like some minor Mafia figure sent to an early death for snitching.

The advantage to consumers–in case the Federal Trade Commission comes after me for unfair and deceptive potboiler practices–is that I got my first novel out of my system before publishing my second first novel. All that self-absorbed crap you usually find in a coming-of-age tale–that’s nowhere to be found in my second, which appeared to the world as my first.

 

My second first novel also had the benefit–or the burden, depending on your perspective–of a professional editor, a requirement imposed on me by the publisher. That wouldn’t have been a problem, except that my book is about a minor league baseball team in Worcester, Mass., and the designated editor was a woman who knew nothing about baseball. So we spent a fair amount of time arguing about, for example, whether a vendor at a ballpark would yell “Hey Coke here!” or “Hey beverages here!” I may not know much, but I know the answer to that one, and she didn’t.

 

But she’s the pro–she had edited (I was told) books by James Patterson, who earns the kind of money from each book he writes that Saudi princes ask their servants to bend over in the street to pick up and put in the change tray of their Bentleys. So I had to go along to get along.

The book had to be a lot shorter, I was told, and Ms. Editor (her name was never revealed to me) went to work chopping it down from 450-some pages to 330 or thereabouts. Along the way, lots of exposition, a leitmotif and an entire subplot were excised. Oh, and a character, in her entirety; Lu Ann Wingo, the sister half of a boy-girl sibling team that made up a Carpenters tribute band, The Carpentbaggers.

 

Gone. Gonzo. Outta here. Ixnay on the emale-fay aracter-kay.

But here’s my promise to you. I’m going to donate 10% of the profits from the book–if any–to the search for Lu Ann. I know she’s out there somewhere, and I won’t rest until they find her. Like O.J. Simpson, I want to prove that I’m innocent–that her disappearance had nothing to do with me.

Not to go all Johnny Cochran on you, but it was the editor who was the predator.