Mark T. Sullivan

I haven't published a new novel in almost five years and I know some of my readers and fans have been asking why.

Some of the reasons were business related, painful and not worth getting into. But after the publication of Serpent's Kiss, I was burnt out for a while and spent a few months wandering around in the woods and along the rivers near my house in Montana, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. The answer after all that therapeutic navel gazing was that I wanted to continue to write. I realized that writing is one of my favorite things to do, and that got my butt back in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard.
Here's a brief account of the last five years.

I was still burnt on novels, so
I taught myself to write screenplays. I wrote three scripts the first year, and then I wrote a novel that I loved but nobody else liked. Then Serpent's Kiss became a huge bestseller in Germany and that gave me the ability to fly to Italy and research what I believe is the last great untold story of World War II.

I returned to the United States, and at the same time wrote the first drafts of both TRIPLE CROSS and the World War II screenplay called THE FORGOTTEN FRONT.

Then I wrote a novel under a pseudonym that my agent's trying to sell.

And

I'm about 90 percent through the writing of my new, new book, tentatively entitled THE 18th RULE.

Along the way I wrote twenty full length magazine articles, founded a business that offers eco-friendly alternatives to asphalt, and became president of a non-profit foundation dedicated to alpine ski racing.

In short, it's been a busy five years even if there hasn't been a lot to show for it on the bookshelves.

I learned a lot in five years and had a heck of a good time for the most part. I try to live every day like it's my last. I laugh a lot.

I go on adventures as often as possible. I spend most days writing down my dreams. I can look out the window of my office and see the Bridger Mountains cast in snow. I'm healthy.

I'm the proud dad of two great boys, and the loving husband of my wife of twenty-five years. I'm a lucky guy. I know it and I thank God for the blessings he's given me every day since I last published a novel.

With his help, I can assure you that it won't be five years until I publish another.

Labels: burnt out, Italy, novel, Triple Cross, World War II, writing

I've written nine novels, half a dozen screenplays, twenty short stories, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, but never a blog. I'm a stickler for form, but this is a writing form that seems to have no form, from letter to shout out, from column to compendium. The point being that after reading hundreds of these things, you realize a blog can be virtually anything you want it to be. Which is cool and scary and creative and daunting.

So, what to blog about, on this, my initial foray?

How about limbo?

I'm not talking the dance. And I'm not talking the Catholic version, which I was introduced to via a disturbing illustration in my second grade catechism book -- a blue whirlpool with black human silhouettes being sucked into the void.

No, I'm talking that limbo between the time you finish a manuscript and when you hold the actual book in your hand. Prior to entering limbo, the manuscript is life consuming, six or seven hours a day, six days a week for a year or more. You spend all this time and you dream, you doodle, you draft, discover and redraft and dream again, until it feels whole to you and your editor.

You've given birth to something, but then, like some scene in Dickens, the baby disappears.

You get to see the baby now and then as it goes through copy editing, galleys and proofing. But it's no longer there every day. You're disconnected and cast into that limbo between writing and publishing, creativity and marketing.

I'm in that limbo right now with TRIPLE CROSS. It been done for almost a year. It comes out in mid-April, three months from now, and I've seen the cover, and read the blurbs other writers have graciously given me. But I've forgotten the experience of writing the novel because I'm so far into the next one, less than fifty pages to go until I have a first draft.

After nine novels, I find that that's the only way to fill the limbo between writing and publishing. I keep writing. I invent something new and it becomes entwined in my life and eventually dominates my thoughts until my editor says it's done; and I'm childless once again, spinning around in that blue whirlpool, looking at the silhouettes that have joined me in limbo, and trying to tell their stories.