Last time I reported on enlisting members of my writing group to help me brainstorm the plot of my current novel, working title To Walk Humbly. I scheduled three sessions, but one was all it took.

Linda Morefield, bless her soul, played sounding board for an hour or so, after which I drove to the Two Amys, ordered a pizza, and wrote out a yellow-pad draft of the storyline of the entire novel. Next day I wrote two more longhand pages of close-in plotting for the chapter at hand, then wrote two-thirds of that actual chapter. I finished writing said chapter the following day.

The story in To Walk Humbly spans from September 1952, when my character Steve starts high school, to September 1955, the lynching and funeral of Emmett Till. That’s far more complex than the story in my first novel To Love Mercy, which took place over 5 1/2 days. Although I now can see the “skeleton” of the new novel, I still don’t know what precisely occurs at each step along the way. So each day before I write actual fiction, I write a “plot journal” in which I figure out what is about to happen and who will do what to whom.

Every writer hears the advice to write every day without fail. It’s advice I’ve ignored in the past, to my great regret, but I’m trying to adhere to it now. Doing so has required me to stop going to the gym first thing, a habit that took years to form and one I relinquish with great regret. But I want badly to get this novel written, and I believe that won’t happen unless I stick my butt in the chair and keep it there.

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After I ate the pizza, I went on the radio. Kathy Troutman, proprietor of The Resume Place and herself author of the Ben Franklin Award-winning Ten Steps to a Federal Job, had invited me on short notice to appear on her Federal News Radio show to talk about my late-in-life literary career. (Kathy is a pal from my Federal Personnel Guide days.) The interview with Kathy and Amy Morris went great, and you can hear it at http://federalnewsradio.com/emedia/76762.wma. It runs less than 10 minutes.

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Next afternoon I visited Borders at White Flint Mall on a rumor, spread by David Stewart of my writing group, that there were copies of To Love Mercy on their “Hot Fiction” table. When I got to Borders, there was no “Hot Fiction” table, but there were three by God copies of To Love Mercy on the shelves.

I found a bookseller and asked if she’d like me to autograph them: She said sure. I asked, How about a signing too? She said, Let me call a manager over. Five minutes later, the manager had pretty much bought in. He and I are to talk this coming week and set a date and time, but I’m thinking: Hmm, that was easy.

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Finally, finishing a busy week, I spoke yesterday at the CityLit Festival in Baltimore, on a panel with two really impressive authors — Kwame Alexander, author of Crush, perhaps the first and only collection of young-adult poems ever written, and John Green, author of An Abundance of Katherines, his second young-adult novel. I’ve known Kwame off and on for six or seven years, but yesterday was the first time I’d been exposed to his poetry. I am here to tell you it is delightful, capturing the essence of teen love in all its messiness. As for Green, he read a passage about the “19 Katherines” who’d dumped his protagonist — starting at age 8. It simply cracked me up. It was an honor and a pleasure to be on this panel with these guys. But …

… there were only about seven people in the audience and half of them were librarians. (CityLit took place inside the glorious Enoch Pratt Free Library just north of downtown Baltimore.) The rest of the day, I sat behind a table flogging books and no one came by; the joint was, like, empty. I sold precisely two books, and one of those was to my fellow panelist John Green. (Kwame has already read To Love Mercy so I couldn’t even sell him a copy.) Let’s see, gross revenues $29.90 for books, less gas, less parking, less lunch, less 85 miles’ wear and tear on the car, less the $20 I spent on other people’s books, less the $10 for a great T-shirt, leaves, um … forget it. If you’re thinking of writing novels for money, find some other way than this to do it.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Call to all in the Chicago area … I’m trying to set up another visit in fall. If you attended Hyde Park High in the middle ’50s, I want to talk to you; if you know someone else who did, please put me in touch with that person. If you know a library, bookstore, book club, church or synagogue where I might sign or speak (or both), please get in touch. Your help, as always, is gratefully appreciated.