Granted, I knew my characters much better when I started High Chicago. Had honed my craft over those four years. Had received excellent reviews and an offer to option the characters for a proposed TV series. All of which buoyed my confidence but amounted to precisely squat when it came to writing the second book.
And so I sat in my newly acquired office, surrounded by my library of crime books. I read and researched matters related to building skyscrapers. Watched the new Trump tower in Chicago go up via Webcam. I furrowed my brow, cracked my knuckles, kneaded my neck muscles and waited, as one sportswriter put it so eloquently, for beads of blood to appear on my forehead. I implored a God I don't believe in. I learned the joys and agonies of online poker. I haunted Book City, Sonic Boom, BMV Books and assorted Thai restaurants on my stretch of Bloor Street.
What I didn't do was write. I didn't even make notes, as I had done with Buffalo Jump, three 200-page notebooks worth. I let it all swirl around in my head like the laundry of the damned. Weeks and months drifted by. I wrote a grand total of two chapters and then junked them. The walls closed in, like the set of a German Impressionist film: The Office of Howie Caligari.
And then, some seven months into the process, it happened. I started to hear Jonah's voice again (both books are told in first person). I think enough time had passed to let the organic process take root. The subconscious had done its percolating thing. The story had been building all this time. It was time to move the surveyors out and let the construction workers in.
Five months later, I completed the first draft. Not only that, it was a damned good draft. My agent, a tremendous editor who knocked down Buffalo Jump more often than the young Mike Tyson knocked down his opponents, basically sent it on to Random House untouched. And Anne Collins, a brilliant editor who had her work cut out for her on Buffalo Jump, hardly got to use her red pen on it.
Just a few months later, the final copy-edited manuscript of High Chicago was on its way. I had made my deadline and the book came out in July, 13 months after its predecessor. I was a book-a-year guy.
So now I'm working on book three. It's taking forever. I'm only halfway through the first draft and there seems no way in hell I'll make the deadline to get it out in summer 2010.
On the plus side, I won an 18-person online Texas Hold 'Em tournament yesterday, pocketing $14.20 on a $2.25 buy-in. Which is probably more than Jeffrey Deaver can say.
Howard Shrier's debut thriller, Buffalo Jump, won the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for the Best First Novel of 2008. A native Montrealer, he now lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.
