KingMidget's Ramblings

I remember reading years ago about an author who said it took something like ten years for them to complete a certain book. That just seemed kind of amazing to me. That writing a story could take that long and that the writer stuck with it. Well … now I understand.

Around 10 1/2 years ago I started writing The Jump. I usually remember what prompts the ideas for my stories. For instance, The Dime is a novel that started with a short story prompted by the following: write a story about a store clerk catching a shoplifter and offering him a deal to avoid punishment. The obvious deal seemed to be a sexual one and I wanted to do something that wasn’t obvious, so I came up with the deal being that the shoplifter had to ask the clerk’s wheelchair-bound sister to a school dance. One thing led to another and that short story eventually became a novel. The story actually isn’t finished and I owe the readers of The Dime an end. At some point.

But with The Jump, I don’t remember anymore where the idea came from. All I know is that I started writing about a construction crane and a wasted version of America. And that led to a President as cult leader, as dictator, as a brutalizer of the American people. I started writing the story a few months before Donald Trump first announced he was running for President. So … I never meant for this story to be a thought piece on a Trump Presidency. (Unfortunately, the further we go into his second term, the closer reality gets to my story.)

So … how did this story came to be?

I wrote a chapter about that construction crane and decided to keep going. There was something I was doing that intrigued me. Creating a world that was close to ours but where the rules were upended and things were just a bit off. It gave me creative license to do a bunch of things. Odd names. Odd cultural references. Just writing things that were a bit more odd than what I usually write.

I started writing the story in first person, with alternating chapters narrated by Richard Bell and his son Cameron. At some point relatively early on, I decided to change the Cameron narrator to his sister Nicole. Just to have a female voice instead of two male voices. Then, years later, after getting feedback from a writer friend, I decided to change it to third person.

This is something I did with One Night in Bridgeport. Wrote the whole damn thing in first person before deciding to rewrite it in third person. Why? Because writing in third person gives me the ability to introduce more story lines and characters into the telling of the story. Doing that with The Jump gave me the opportunity to provide better background on Alisdair Weston, who became President and dictator.

While I changed the story to third person, I kept the basic structure the same. Richard traveling across the country, with his adult children traveling separately trying to find him. Which necessarily meant two different story lines.

About 25,000 words into the story, the first major block arrived. I couldn’t decide if I was going to write chapter after chapter after chapter of their journeys across the country. Or should I, at some point, skip ahead. Part of the problem was that I just couldn’t figure out what to fill all of those chapters with if I took the first option. The other part of the problem was that I had yet to figure out how the two traveling groups would end up meeting up.

Another problem cropped up as well. Trump became President and I simply did not want to write a story about a cult-like President becoming dictator and having everybody say, “ooooh, this is about Trump, isn’t it?” I’d have to yell at them and deny that. As a result, I just kind of lost interest in writing the story.

Every once in awhile though, I’d pick the story up again and read through it trying to get motivated to keep going. I’d get to the part where I had left off and ponder it and come to the same conclusion. How do I do this? How do I end it? How? And I couldn’t answer those questions, so I’d put the story to the side again.

I even asked my cover artists for a sample cover featuring a construction crane that I could print out and put on my wall to try to inspire me. It didn’t work.

I did know how I wanted to end the story. I just didn’t know how I wanted to get there and so I waited.

Around a year ago, I decided to put aside my distaste for the comparison of my story to Trump. I also made a decision about that other issue — whether to write chapter after chapter after chapter detailing their daily journey across the country or to skip ahead. You’ll have to read the book to find out what my decision was.

I started writing again and got to the “end.” At one point, I told somebody that I thought a good, focused weekend of writing could result in wrapping up the story. But that didn’t happen. I kept finding reason to write another chapter. And then another. The “end” seemed to be going on forever.

So, I faced another decision. Do I keep writing chapter after chapter after chapter that produces an ending that answers all the questions about what happened and why? Or do I skip ahead and end the thing. Again, you’ll have to read the book to see what I did with that decision point.

Once I ended the story, I sent it to a couple of beta readers. One of them loved it. One of them didn’t, but she admitted that she didn’t like the genre so she wasn’t the best beta reader for it. I then sent it to a third — one who isn’t a writer, just a reader. I never heard back from him. 😉

From there, I decided to start the publishing process. Publishing to an e-book is relatively easy. There isn’t a lot of formatting to do for an e-book. I got that done and set the publication date for 9/1/25. I turned to the paperback then, which isn’t so easy.

Every time I try to format the text for paperback, I get it wrong. Some detail or other I just can’t figure out on Word to format it correctly. Typically, it is the header at the top of each page that has my name on one side and the title of the book on the other. I’ve pretty much given up on that. But also, the page numbering is a problem. The way page numbers are supposed to work on a book is to use Roman numerals on the “front matter” and then regular numbers once the story starts, but don’t have a 1 on the first page, only start with a 2 on the second page.

I’ve managed to get this right with previous books, but this time I simply could not get it right. The section breaks in Word were not doing what they were supposed to do. A writer friend, the beta reader who didn’t like The Jump, suggested I try Atticus — a program that allows you to upload your manuscript and it takes care of all the formatting.

I shelled out almost $150 for Atticus and ran the manuscript through it. Submitted the final product to Draft2Digital, along with the wonderful cover Karen Phillips made, set the publication date for 9/15 (a little later than the ebook because I’ve learned that paperbacks just take longer) and ordered a proof copy. It came, the cover was off. The title on the spine was in the wrong place. The missus read the proof and found a few typos and things that needed to be fixed. So, I corrected the material for both the paperback and the ebook.

And that’s where Atticus started to fail me. I could not get the formatting right, but frequently I couldn’t tell that unless I uploaded the manuscript to Draft2Digital and looked at the finished product in their reader. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t get things on the write page. The title page needed to be on the right side, copyright on the left side, dedication on the right, then a blank page on the left, then the tagline for the book on the right, then a blank page on the left, then the story starts on the right. Atticus did get all of the page numbers and headers right, but I couldn’t get that pagination right.

I ended up reaching out to my friend and she explained that with Atticus you don’t upload any of the front matter with your manuscript, just the story itself and Atticus creates the front matter for you. And if you want things between the front matter and the story (like the tagline), you create a new chapter just for that. So, I did that. And it worked.

All told, I uploaded almost 20 versions of the manuscript from Atticus to Draft2Digital before getting it the way it needed to be. But now I know how to do it the right way. I just hope I remember all of this for my next book.

And that’s how an idea becomes a story which becomes a book. At least that’s my process.

In recent weeks, I’ve started to embrace the idea that my book does have something to say about our current state affairs. There are some parallels. In The Jump, the President has a paramilitary organization at his disposal. They are called The President’s Men and they are responsible for most of the death and destruction and desolation that has stretched across the country. I can’t help but see in ICE and Trump’s increasing militarization of law enforcement as being a parallel to The President’s Men. So to, in The Jump there are states and areas where things are relatively “normal,” versus states that have been destroyed. I can’t help but see parallels in how Trump handles blue states versus red states. There is also an element of cosplay in The Jump which I can’t help but see in a lot of the actions by people in Trump’s administration. And ultimately, the tagline for The Jump seems more and more eerie. Nothing is as it seems, but Everything is as it should be. When friends comment on some of Trump’s horrors, I reply with “it’s all according to plan.”

I don’t think things will get as bad in real life as they get in The Jump, but I also didn’t think things would get as bad as they currently are. Here’s to hoping that The Jump doesn’t turn into non-fiction.

If you’ve got this far and want to read The Jump, it is available just about everywhere ebooks and paperbacks are sold on-line.