The Book Stacks

Richard Aaron, author of the suspense novel Gauntlet is joining us today to talk about his life, his books and his path to becoming an author.

I loved books as a child, and that has not changed. Happiness is curling up in a corner somewhere with a fine cup of coffee and cracking open a good work of fiction. I love libraries, I love bookstores. I am, in my day job, a lawyer, and have accumulated more that 10,000 volumes of law texts, because I derive comfort from them (the rest of the law firm does all the legal research online, and they think I’m nuts).

About ten years ago I was going through a bout of extreme depression, and went to a clinic in Kansas to get myself sorted out. There I learned that the psychiatric testing I’d done had proclaimed me to be someone who should be writing fiction. I thought it silly at first, though I have developed, in the course of 28 years of appearing before the courts, a great capacity to weave works of fiction, more or less. Eventually I started to toy with it.

What someone should have told me was that I was playing with fire. Once the muse grabs you, it doesn’t let go. I made the hero an autistic mathematician, in honor of my son. I played around with one of the heroes, basing him on the man I’d be if I were an FBI agent. And from there it took off. One hundred pages quickly turned into 200, and eventually 1,000.

Once I was finished, I had to find something to do with it. So I thought I’d do what you did with manuscripts – see if anyone was interested. I sent out several hundred copies over the agent universe, and got one bite. And I got a dose of humility. There were so many things wrong with the manuscript that people got tired of listing the problems.

I quickly learned that as an author you have to first find an able editor, and then accept their ability to chop away entire story lines, to twist and turn the book in ways you had not imagined, to make it work. I found such a person, and we spent years getting the book ready for publication. It was a torturous process, but I survived; so did the book, and so did the editor (barely).

Although I have one book published, with another in the hopper (and more in my head), I do not yet consider myself a writer. My day job is that of lawyer. That’s what pays the bills. If this process begins to grow, and I have a dozen books out there (which I hope to do), and the income from them keeps the moldering manor going, then I will consider myself a writer. That’s the light at the end of the tunnel, for me.