And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, but now, SLIM AND NONE is here!
To steal a march on my great hero Winston Churchill, this is not the beginning of the end but it is the end of the beginning.
What started out as a command from a good friend (“Write The Damn Book! I’m tired of people telling you that you ought to write a book! Write a damn book!”), I at first tentatively and then with greater push, wrote my maiden voyage effort, FRIDAY CALLS. It was fun to create and I enjoyed the process. It was surprisingly well-received. The gauntlet had been thrown down.
This was at a time-only about five or six years ago- when I was still a full bore, hard charging, all hands on deck trial and courtroom lawyer. I wrote little by little, early in the morning hours, with a drink after work, sporadically and the book became my companion, my shadow. I thought about it all the time. And I mean ‘All The Time’.
(I once heard the great and prolific Joyce Carol Oates say that whenever she begins work on ‘the next book’, she thinks about it 80% of the time and writes it about 20% of the time. I took comfort in that.)
So now, I have written a book. What next? I have never cottoned to being a one-hit wonder. I practiced law for 45 years. I swam in a tsunami of cases over those decades. How ridiculous would it have been for me to win a big one and then step away? Nonsense! Work is like being a little bit pregnant.
I have always loved the stern line, “Lead, Follow or Get Out Of The Way!” Get in or get out.
So predictably, I tried my hand a second time and the result was YOU HAVE YOUR WAY which early in its creation evolved naturally and obviously into the second volume of ‘The Adventures and Misadventures of Lawyer Eddie Terrell Trilogy’.
Early in the writing of YHYW, I realized that I was loosely but surely following the path of the great John Updike and his Rabbit Angstrom trilogy which as we all know began with ‘Run Rabbit Run’.
FRIDAY CALLS is Eddie as a Young Turk, YHYW is Eddie as a pro’s pro and SLIM AND NONE is Eddie, still a pro’s pro who knows and understands he is running out of runway.
(Oh, by the way, who is this Eddie Terrell fellow? Here’s a blatant hint. When I was born, my mother (the indomitable Rosena Ferrell) and father (the smart as a whip and savvy card player, Joe Glenn) named me Edward Vernon Ferrell Glenn-for her father with my Daddy’s name caboosed. I think if you briefly play with the words, you will deduce Eddie Terrell’s genesis.)
YHYW was a more comfortable write. I had begun to find rhythm and confirmed that I did not suffer from writer’s block. When I wrote, it just came to me. Now, I am happy to admit that I not a drudge about all this. Oscar Wilde once noted in frustration, “Sometimes I take half the day to put in a comma and the other half taking it out.” No such dismal blocks of time for me. Find a comfortable place to work and get after it for an hour or two and then let it be, let it cure up.
I use my laptop. No scratching it out on legal pads. Not only does that slow me down, over the years my handwriting has deteriorated to the point of being basically unreadable except (sometimes!) to me. Too many witnesses and lawyers and judges to be studied and scrutinized-looked at-while I used big, long legal pads and scrawled my looping observations and notes without looking at the pad. Chaotic but effective. And ruinous to any semblance of readability.
It was when I started YHYW that I began to contemplate what it would be like to leave the law. The idea of ‘retirement’ has always been anathema to me. Would I get sick? Would I just up and die? Would I get bored? Would I get distracted? And the idea of just calling it quits and walking away was totally unappealing. I don’t play golf or tennis. I don’t play cards. I like to walk around, get some exercise, travel, watch sports, gamble a bit on games and horses, read a lot, visit with family and friends and think. The writing was engaging. The lightbulb came on. Ah, that’s it.
So I am an author now. I haven’t retired; I’ve just changed planes.
Happily, YHYW was even better than FRIDAY CALLS and again, very well received and my path to a full trilogy was set.
Somewhere in my ever-spreading piles and layers and collections of notes, I know I wrote down the start date for SLIM AND NONE but I have no idea where it is and what that day might have been.
But I do know and can say definitively that I finished the manuscript and send it to my wonderful publicist Hannah and wonderful editor Alice on February 8, 2022.
I think (suppose this falls under the philosophy of ‘It’s a damn poor dog that won’t wag its own tail.’) S&N is, so far my best work, Pre-release reviews have been real good and now we have a complete set of works with continuity to discuss with agents in California and New York. I will, as I have done with the first two, read it in studio and soon the audio book, if that be your preference, will be available.
I am now working on the next one plus have my eye on some short story work. Eddie, I think, will always for the greatest part be within hailing distance. As I always say, we will see…
From February 8, 2022 to today, September 14,m 2023 has been frustratingly too long. A myriad of circumstances and factors have contributed to this extended interregnum-predominantly Covid-but now here it is and we are definitively pleased. I hope you enjoy it!
Now, stay safe, keep reading and keep thinking.
All my best to you and yours,
Vernon
P.S. To order a copy of Slim and None, hit the button below! I so appreciate your support.