Swann's Lake of Despair by Charles Salzberg

I do this until I’m about halfway through the manuscript. When I’m working on a novel, I’ll always go back to the first chapter and read through it until I get to where I ended and then start writing again, rewriting as I go. The only explanation I have is that I’m a very fast typist, 90 words a minute, and that I can really focus when I do sit down at the computer.

I’m amazed when I look back and see that I’ve written and published over 30 books, almost 100 magazine articles and book reviews and close to a dozen short stories. I’ll do almost anything to avoid writing. I devoured all three newspapers that were delivered every morning, and two that were delivered in the evening.It was a foregone conclusion that I’d wind up a writer because then I could create my own worlds to live in. At meals, I read the labels off cereal boxes or Ketchup bottles. I just won the Beverly Hills Book Award for Best Crime Novel of 2018 for Second Story Man. My next novel, probably the last in the Swann series, will be out in May, 2019. Since then, I’ve written nothing but fiction, have published six other novels, two novellas and several short stories. My real first novel, Swann’s Last Song, wasn’t published until 2007, even though I wrote it 25 years earlier, and it was actually nominated for a Shamus Award for Best PI Novel. If you look for it, you’ll find it, but I’m not going to help you by giving you the title. I was going to use a pseudonym, but the publisher forgot, printed the covers with my real name on it and when I complained said it would cost me to make the change, so I let it go.

I published my first novel, a paperback original, based on a magazine article on street gambling I wrote for the Sunday magazine of the Daily News. But I never gave up the dream of writing novels, and so that’s what I did. First, magazine articles, then nonfiction books. Having to put a roof over my head and food on the table, I found myself writing nonfiction. I never wanted to be anything but a novelist, but I got sidetracked. It’s in a drawer somewhere, but I haven’t had the nerve to look at it yet. Not long ago, I moved and I actually found that artifact. I had recently learned how to touch type, a class I had to take in school in order to be allowed to skip a grade (to this day I maintain it was the best class I ever took), and I made it to three single-space pages before I ran out of things to say.

It was a roman a clef (although I certainly did not know what that term meant at the time) about a sleepaway summer camp.

Swann's Lake of Despair by Charles Salzberg