A Writer's Tale

During the months that followed, I also wrote numerous stories for young adults, a nonfiction book about driving (Driving Me Nuts, never published), and began working as an office temporary. With so many other situations getting in the way, I didn’t finish the first draft of The Cellar II until October 13, 1983. I didn’t get around to completing the final version and sending it to my agent until January 13, 1985, more than a year after finishing the initial draft.

Tor, which would later buy and publish my previously written books, Night Show and Tread Softly, was offered The Beast House but rejected it. Reading between the lines of the rejection letter, I figured out that the editor had misgivings about the propriety of certain events that take place in the book.

“In all good conscience,” she couldn’t publish such a book.

(I’m sure she would’ve rejected The Cellar on the same grounds, given the chance. And who knows, maybe she did.)

Overseas, The Beast House was purchased by New English Library in April, 1985, at the same time as Allhallow’s Eve. It was published in 1986. It saw U.S. publication in 1987 when brought out in a very limited fashion by a shortlived Canadian house, Paperbacks.

Back in England, it was re-issued a couple of times by New English Library, then taken over by Headline, who published it in 1993. In 1995. Book Club Associates brought out a hardbound “double book” containing The Beast House and Allhallow’s Eve.

Oddly enough, publishers and reviewers have rarely linked The Beast House to The Cellar. So far, the connection between the two books is pretty much a secret to everyone except my real fans.

Before leaving The Beast House, I want to throw in a disclaimer. A major plot line of the book belongs to a writer who comes to Malcasa Point in hopes of doing a non-fiction book about Beast House. The writer is the scum of the earth. His name is Gorman Hardy.

At the time, I didn’t know that Gorman could even be a name. I thought I had invented it.

Subsequently, however, I became very good friends with the writer, Ed Gorman. Far from being the scum of the earth, Ed Gorman is the salt. If I’d known Ed at the time I wrote The Beast House, I would have given my dispicable writer a very different name.

Ed has never brought my attention to the matter. But it is something that has bothered me over the years, so I thought this would be a good time to mention it.

A STRANGER’S ARMS and PASSION STORM

Immediately after finishing the first draft of The Beast House (and part of the reason that more than a year went by before I could actually finish whipping it into its final shape), I received a contract to write two contemporary romantic suspense novels. The deal, arranged by Jay Garon, was with James Bryans, the same packager who’d been behind The Making of America series.

I’d gotten $10,000 for writing The Lawmen.

I would be getting $500 each for these.

At that point, $500 sounded pretty good. Lousy pay for writing an entire book, but more than my monthly income. I could use it. In a bad way. So I accepted the contract.

I was sent general guidelines for each book. I recall doing some research on the logging industry and paper mills.

And I actually had fun writing them.

I stayed home from my temporary office work and churned out about twenty pages per day. This was at least four times my usual output. And it suffered no revisions. My first draft was my only draft.

As each page came out of my typewriter, so it was sent to the publisher.

Oddly enough, I’ve always looked back on the “fast writing” of those two books as a significant learning experience. I was forced to plunge ahead, commit to paper pretty much the first thing that occurred to me, leap into the flow of the story and let it carry me along in its currents, write by instinct and the seat of my pants.

It taught me something about how to move along with the currents…

And it taught me that I’m capable of writing twenty pages a day if I have to.

I finished the two books ahead of the deadline and got paid my handsome sum. A Stranger’s Arms by Carla Laymon was published by Blue Heron Press in 1984, and also published in Germany. To the best of my knowledge, Passion Storm has never been published.

I was told that Blue Heron had gone out of business before they could get to my second book. If Passion Storm ever did get published, nobody told me about it.

ALARUMS or ALARMS

I wrote the original version of Alarums in 1985 and it didn’t get published for eight years.

It was part of my plan to open a second front as a suspense author. The 1985 version of the novel (unpublished) bears the Richard Kelly pseudonym.

The plan didn’t work.