The Process

iPad: the new face of writer's block.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you probably saw status updates like this last year: “Time to coffee-up and get to work on Chapter 22. It feels like I’m barreling toward the end now.” Chapter 22 of what, you may ask. Well, chapter 22 of my first novel, Midlife Mouse.

This process began two summers ago. While dealing with the worst personal financial crisis of my adult life, I began to post blog entries here and on Facebook about my struggles and how my faith in God was being reshaped in the process. In the meantime, I shared with an old friend from high school some of my pie-in-the-sky ideas for becoming a novelist – whenever my busy life would allow me to pursue that dream. That friend then started a Facebook group called “I think Wayne Franklin should write his novel now.” About a hundred or so friends joined. The pressure was on.

Last August, I began writing. Given that I had been thinking about the first chapter for nearly two years, I was able to knock it out in less than 24 hours. Chapter two took a little longer – about 2 days. Chapter three took a week. Chapter four I worked on in fits and starts over the next four or five months. With a small break in my schedule, I knocked out chapter five in early Spring.

With five chapters under my belt, I asked my TV agent if she could pass them along to someone who could provide feedback and let me know if I was simply wasting my time. I expected her to send it to an agent who specialized in the literary field as she specializes in national cable TV. Instead, she sent the pages to a friend who just happened to be a senior-level exec and publisher of an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

A few weeks passed with no word. My schedule was about to get crazy with two big commercial campaigns. I wanted to get a sense of where I stood before then. While awaiting feedback, I became convinced that if my agent emailed me the feedback, it would be negative. If she called, however, that would be a good sign. One Thursday afternoon in April, I was driving home after running some pre-production errands when I received a call. It was my agent. Good news? My heart raced as I answered.

She told me that she had just received an email from the publishing imprint. Uh-oh. A phone call about an email. I hadn’t accounted for this variable. She said the editor was very enthusiastic about the first five chapters and wanted to read the rest of the manuscript over the weekend to present to her editorial board the next week. I had to reluctantly explain that there was no “rest of the manuscript.” And I wouldn’t be able to start writing again for at least three weeks. The editor was very understanding and we have had a friendly dialogue in the intervening months.

Fortunately, my busy spring of commercial production opened up a summer of opportunity to work on the novel. For the full of last summer, I worked as a novelist. No, I haven’t gotten a check yet for my endeavors, but it was a full-time job. In fact, my days writing looked an awful lot like some of my days editing TV projects: long and longer. On my best days, I would knock out an average 12-page chapter in a single day. More typical were days when I would write 8-10 pages. The book finally came in at 27 chapters and roughly 96,000 words – most of which I wrote over a two-month period.

Since finishing the manuscript, I have not heard any more from the publishing imprint. In the meantime, my TV agent is helping me find the right lit agent to move this thing forward, with the plan being that the two reps would work together to market both publishing and film rights. But is it any good? Well, I’ve had a handful of people read it. Two in particular are good judges of the work (because they don’t bear my last name.) Once is a professor and published author. Another is a writer and former editor at a small publishing house. They both loved it.

Back to our original question: what exactly is a Midlife Mouse? To best answer that, here’s the treatment I sent the publisher:

Bill Durmer is in over his head. Staring headlong at 40, having lost his family business and blaming himself for the impending demise of his hometown, he finds himself bunkered in a darkened hotel room, surrounded by the Mickey-eared commandos of the Walt Disney World S.W.A.T. team. This is not how he expected to spend his summer vacation.

In a genre mash-up of satire, Southern lit and mystery from first-time novelist Wayne Franklin, Midlife Mouse follows under-achieving genius Bill Durmer on an absurd adventure through American pop culture. The simple life of running his family’s electronics store (a life for which he had given up a promising tech career) comes crashing down in one fateful day for his idyllic coastal hometown of Decent Chance, Alabama.

Sleep-deprived and depressed, Bill experiences a hyper-caffeinated epiphany while watching a constant loop of Beauty and the Beast: he wants to be “the baker with his tray like always.” After a lifetime of being told he was destined for greatness only to find his life squarely in the middle of the road of mediocrity, Bill gives up. He wants to be a simple character living in the background of a fantasy world. In the mother of all midlife crises, he does what any formerly levelheaded, upstanding father of three would do: he runs away to Walt Disney World…and he takes his nine-year-old daughter, Cleary, with him.

At the Happiest Place on Earth, Bill finds himself doing anything but blending into the background. An eccentric elderly couple carrying a “towel baby,” costumed characters with a penchant for kidnap, a retro spaceman, ghosts, pirates, Imagineers and suburban housewives battle for Bill’s allegiance in a prophecy-driven turf war that promises to alter his destiny. With the aid of a mysterious bus-driving mentor, Bill navigates the strange and twisty waters of Disney fandom. Opposing him, however, are unseen foes known to Bill only as The Powers. Their efforts to prevent Bill from fulfilling the prophecy know no bounds. Then there’s the little matter of that S.W.A.T. team.

Compounding matters even more is the overbearing presence of his sister, Nancy, a classist Southern Belle to the manner born. Bill’s every move is made in the shadow of a long and storied family history in Decent Chance — a legacy literally blackened in the wake of Bill’s leaving town — and in the even longer shadow of his sister’s disapproval. In the end, Bill must choose whether to accept his prophetic destiny, return home to save Decent Chance or pursue his ill-conceived dream of simply fading into the background.

Through a quirky, but absurdly real, cast of characters and a fantastic series of events, Midlife Mouse holds a satirical mirror up to modern American life, offering a story about midlife crisis, the search for meaning, the changing nature of fandom and the uneasy, hypocritical relationship between Americans and corporate brands. But at its heart, it is a complex portrait of a simple family struggling with the pressures of class, success, and societal identity that threaten to tear them apart.

Oh, and there’s a mouse in there, too.

So that’s it in a nutshell. For a closer peek at the process, here is a list of chapter titles:

Ch. 1: “Skulking in the Shadows of A Giant Spaceman’s Legs”
Ch. 2: “The Mystery of the Towel Baby Couple”
Ch. 3: “The Buffet Promise”
Ch. 4: “According to the Bus Driver”
Ch. 5: “Beware the Cartoon Future That Never Was”
Ch. 6: “All Because of a Yard Sign”
Ch. 7: “Everything’s Disposable”
Ch. 8: “One-Eyed Jack and All of His Trades”
Ch. 9: “The Night of the Black Jubilee”
Ch. 10: “There Goes the Baker”
Ch. 11: “The Hyper-Caffeinated Delusion”
Ch. 12: “A Case of Mistaken Affinity
Ch. 13: “It Take an Army to Fight a Closed-Head Injury”
Ch. 14: “All the Best Storytellers Have Their CDLs”
Ch. 15: “Duct Taped and Stuffed in a Pig”
Ch. 16: “It’s a Big Bus After All”
Ch. 17: “Keep the Home Fish Mounds Burning”
Ch. 18: “Nine Words of Nine Words”
Ch. 19: “Just Call Me Mommy”
Ch. 20: “The Return of the Fishbowl Pajamas”
Ch. 21: “A Melodious Menagerie of Purveyors of Musical Perfection”
Ch. 22: “A Kiss for the Ages”
Ch. 23: “Under the Watchful Gaze of Dwarfs”
Ch. 24: “Fate, as Determined by a Head in a Jar”
Ch. 25: “Ontological Issues Ignored by a Hack Writer”
Ch. 26: “The Last Drawing of Walt Disney”
Ch. 27: “Closing the Book on Bill Durmer”