My fifth novel, The Odds, is one of two titles I’ve had traditionally published. There’s a somewhat long story behind how it landed at a publishing house. I’ll share some of the details about that experience, all while offering some insights—such as they are—about my experience and interactions with the mainstream publishing industry at large. I haven’t had many, but I think they’re informative for any writer, beginning or otherwise.
Note: I decided to split this entry into multiple parts. In this entry, I’ll only discuss the composition process behind the book itself.
But besides the business stuff, The Odds is the first novel of mine where I felt like everything came together into a truly coherent whole. As the saying goes, it’s all of a piece. As the first novel of mine that was entirely a product of planning, The Odds was also a distant echo of The Island Circus Part Two in a very sad and particular sense; my fourth novel ended with a funeral for one of the characters, but if you’ll indulge a bit of woo, it was also the funeral for not only my “pantsing” self, but also the angry young man who had written my first four novels.
That angry young man was dying during the rewrites of The Island Circus Part Two, and all the novels I’ve written since then have reflected the older and sadder person I’ve grown into.
Sadder. I worry that’s too strong a word, but it’s the best I can conjure. I’m trying to describe the difference between the “me” of now and the “me” of then; the only other word that springs to mind is “wiser,” and I certainly don’t feel wiser. I simply got less angry. And it’s not that I don’t hold grudges anymore; it’s that the grudges of my youth are silly and meaningless compared to some of the crap I’ve put up with the last few years. I wish I could point to some epiphany or sea-change in my life, a moment where I gave up childish things and instantly transformed into a new and better person … but there wasn’t one.
I simply did a lot of living, endured my share of hardship, and lost myself in some challenging work. Along the way, the anger of my twenties settled and softened into the lingering regrets—and yes, resentments—of my thirties.
The Odds was an attempt to unpack some of those feelings.
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I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that would happen when I set out to write it. I never, ever write with a theme in mind. I’m not sure if anyone does, but I certainly don’t. I come up with a story, try to make it as exciting as possible, and then write it. If a theme emerges from the process, great.
And one always does. I think anyone with a pulse who creates art of any type or quality—even stuff that’s bad—will wind up with a theme or themes. Even my dogshit first novel, Devil’s Jukebox, dealt in some sense with unresolved childhood trauma, body image, and my prickly feelings about starting or having a family.
In The Odds, its theme emerged from the goofy story engine I came up with, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
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I’ve always wanted to give to others what pop-culture gave to me. I know it’s silly, but when I work on my books, I think back across every great work that’s stirred my soul, given me gosebumps, or put a lump in my throat, and I’ve tried to invent characters and moments and twists and pay-offs that do the same for you. There are moments I like in my first four novels—especially part two of The Island Circus—but in The Odds, my dumb, foolhardy quest to give that gift back found its best voice to date.
Such as it is.
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The Odds began as a very different book. My first intention was to write a modern crime novel set in a small desert town with a protagonist who never speaks. Taking inspirations from spaghetti westerns, I actually intended for the book’s lead to only go by a nickname, “the redhead,” recalling how Eli Wallach calls the Man with No Name “blondie” in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
I wrote the first ten pages of this at some point in the aughts—maybe 2007 or 2008?—before I set it aside to rewrite the second part of The Island Circus. When I came back to it, I had just ended a three-year relationship and moved into a little one-bedroom apartment in Silver Lake. It was quiet and comfortable. I was single and unencumbered. I worked freelance web design gigs to make ends meet. I could walk to the gym and the grocery store.
I loved it.
I set up my workstation next to a big picture window that looked out on some palm trees … and I contemplated which novel I wanted to write next. I still had Magic Spiders to rewrite, but I wanted to move on to something new. I went back to that gritty crime novel. It opens like this:
The redhead came to town to celebrate his deathday.
A bulky motorcycle hummed between the redhead’s legs as he passed a green highway sign that hung from one corner and told him he was entering a place called Nevada. Minutes later, he rode into the town at a red dusk. The town was brown, mostly, except for a few flashes of yellow coming from the grimy lightbulbs and neon tubes that remained. No one greeted him because no one was outside. Thermometers in that part of the world had permanent mercury stains around one hundred fifty and fifty below. The sun rose hard and set fast, and nothing but desert-hot and desert-cold followed it into the brown town.
But by this point in my life, I’d fully become a planner, so I launched into an outline of this new book. True to form, I quickly abandoned the modern, naturalistic setting in favor of something much stranger. I still wanted to write a crime novel set in the desert, but as I followed my redheaded motorcyclist through this terrain, I started to unearth a post-apocalyptic world that I’ve still yet to fully map out and which makes me smile every time I think about it.
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I’d already written one unusual scene in a casino, but here’s where things really went off the rails:
At the northeastern boundary of the city, a second turnoff — this one paved black — split off from the main road to the north and began a long, slow descent into the earth down a paved ramp. As Eldridge rode his bike down the ramp, walls of earth rose on either side. The only sound was the hum of his bike between his knees, but soon another sound joined it — the thrum of wind ahead. The road ended in a black, flat surface that seemed to be moving. Vertical walls wiped across his sightline and emitted gusts of warm air.
He rode his bike into the giant revolving door, which rotated around a broad stone pivot set in the earth. On the other side, the walls split open with a deluge of light and a stew of stenches that included fried flesh, miscellaneous rot and the periodic burst of purified air from giant fans that churned somewhere above.
The subterranean part of Dedrick, the main part, hid under the earth and under a giant, vaulted ceiling. The ceiling was made of red bricks, but an elaborate network of catwalks covered most of the ceiling and the walls like a coating of cobwebs. Standing where he was, just inside the giant revolving door, Eldridge was standing at the midpoint of the city’s southern wall. He faced due north, looking down the main drag, Sinister Street, which bisected the city from north to south.
Even though I wound up taking a hard, lurching left turn into science-fiction, I still felt the allure of a small town. The city of Dedrick, or “remnant” in the world’s parlance, is one of those kooky, inbred places where everyone knows everyone else, and no one has a truly private life.
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When time came for me to come up with a story engine, I went back to an idea I came up with when I was, no kidding, about six years old. Remember that “goofy story engine” I mentioned a moment ago? Here it is:
I used to draw little storybooks as a kid. Most of them were just remakes of movies or cartoons I liked, but after playing the video games Battle Chess and Archon, I wrote a storybook called Chess. It depicted two men playing a match. Every time one of them made a capturing move, I cut away to a battle. The pawns were on foot, wielding bows and arrows, while a rook was driving what approximated a semi-truck. Derivative, but pretty creative for a little weirdo!
As a booger-brained six-year-old, I didn’t make a dramatic connection between the match being played and the cutaway scenes; they were just fantastical imaginings of the capturing moves.
For The Odds, I made the connection.
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My goofy story engine is a deathmatch tournament based on the rules of chess. Nicknamed “Xiang” after the name for Chinese Chess, Xiang-qi, it works like this: In seclusion, two people play a match, and every time there’s a capturing move, two people have to play out the capture according to a set of rules that grant the stronger piece more advantages—they get more firepower and can give less notice before they begin their attack.
My protagonist gained a name, Eldridge, and a mission: he owes a lot of money to the wrong people, so he’s forced to enter this deathmatch tournament.
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I cooked up a byzantine set of rules to govern the game—queens get the most advantages, bishops can use poison, knights can use flying apparatus—and I was always willing to massage the rules to generate more drama on the page.
These rules are enforced by a device, injected into the players necks, called a “polycharge.”
The device was equipped to detect the treachery and would, in response, detonate a bomb powerful enough to decapitate the competitor. The rumortrysts told tales of Xiang matches of old in which scofflaw players would raise a gun in an attempt to kill an unsuspecting competitor, and their polycharge would blow off half their neck and leave them staggering around with their head dangling on a few strings of tendons and nerve tissue before their bodies collapsed. In the early days of Xiang, the occasional competitor would meet an untimely demise when they considered cheating on a loved one or otherwise pondered a dishonest action unrelated to the Xiang tournament. And their heads would explode.
Over time, the tech had been perfected to avoid any false positives.
Most of the time.
Injecting an explosive device into the neck is of course a nod to John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, which heavily influenced this novel’s tone and texture.
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Early in the outlining process, I decided that the book’s main story would revolve around one of these deathmatch battles. We get glimpses of other battles and we watch Eldridge fight in a few, but the novel’s heart and soul would center around a battle between him and someone from his past. I wasn’t sure yet, but I knew I wanted it to be a “rook versus rook” battle, because the rook’s Xiang rules require the combatants to use only explosives and certain kinds of vehicles.
As I contemplated who Eldridge would face off against, I sat back and did a lot of inventing.
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Let me pause and underline this point, because this is where I think outlining truly benefits me. Other writers may disagree, but it’s a must for me and my process. I’ve done some good writing while pantsing, but I think my best material has come from me sitting back and trying to think of the coolest shit I possibly can. That might sound silly and obvious, but I’m a big believer in it. One mantra I chant while I outline is:
Be dubious of first draft choices.
A “first draft” choice is, for me, whatever first springs to your mind, and they’re not necessarily confined to your first draft. Oh, sure—sometimes you’ll get lucky and hit on something cool. One “first draft” choice that I wound up keeping was the name of the apocalyptic event that sired this world, “deadblast.” I’ve always liked it.
But more often than not, I’ll sit down and write down ten or twenty ideas at a time. Having said this … hoo boy do I feel silly, given how little success I’ve found in this arena!
That said, I love the process, and in the case of The Odds, I cooked up one of my all-time favorite inventions, the mighty Order of the Narsyan.
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If you’re friends with me, and if you’ve read my novels, you remember the Narsyans. Even thinking about them makes me smile, as insane as they are. Purity is hard to come by in post-deadblast world … unless you’re a Narsyan. They’re an elite order of physically perfect fanatics who spend every waking hour working out, running ultramarathons, or vigorously copulating—or “powerfucking” in Narsyan parlance.
Eldridge had been a Narsyan in his youth but got drummed out of the order. His expulsion underscores the central “rook versus rook” battle, which I’ll get to in a moment, but first, let me sketch out where the Narsyans sit in my thematic brain.
First and foremost, they speak for my body dismorphia and my foolhardy desire to achieve a perfect physique, but they’re also a distant and bonkers echo of my time playing sports in junior high and high school. I’m in good shape, but I was never any kind of athlete, and one of best moves I made in high school was to stop playing sports and start doing theater. It’s wild how such a move can change your self-perception; playing football, I got called all kinds of names, but when I started doing plays, I remember being called a “jock” at one point. Madness.
But even more than those ideas, the Narsyans served as a vehicle for everyone’s favorite theme, unresolved childhood trauma.
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Novels rarely depict the real world in a one-to-one ratio. At least mine don’t. People from my past, or indeed myself as a proxy, will appear in different forms, as will more specific events or moments, yes, but changed to suit the drama. Strong Bones is is the most autobiographical novel I’ve written, and yet there’s not one person or incident that one hundred percent directly corresponds to any one person or incident in real life.
Once again, I’m stating the glaringly obvious, but with The Odds, my feelings about childhood—both my early and teen years—manifested in the book’s twisted, heightened, cockeyed reality.
I’ll skip over the gory details, but when Eldridge was a child, he tried to use the resources of the Narsyan order to help a sick friend. In doing so, he disrupts one of the order’s most revered rituals—a weeklong visionquest—inviting the wrath of the Order’s leadership … which includes one of his best friends.
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When I’m planning out a book, certain key scenes present themselves in the composition process fairly early. It’s usually the ending, but with The Odds, it was the “true” climax—a headcanon term of my own that originated in my college studies.
I wrote and workshopped an adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a pair of theater classes where I got to work with an unbelievable professor, Paul Edwards of Northwestern University. He worked closely with me on this adaptation, then invited me to direct scenes from it in a class the following quarter. No one’s ever going to get me mixed up with Sidney Lumet, but I’m deeply proud of this work.
During the adaptation process, Paul pointed out how C.S. Lewis’ story has a false climax. (I’m paraphrasing from a distant memory, so bear with me.) The big battle at the end isn’t the actual climax. Nope, the true climax happens earlier, when the White Witch murders Aslan on the Stone Table, followed by Aslan’s return.
Paul’s perspective, which I agree with, is that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has a problem: one of the lead characters is, for all intents and purposes, god, and he can’t be killed. How do you make that suspenseful? Lewis manages to find some suspense in his death, but once he returns from the dead, the story’s pretty much over.
That idea lurked in the back of my mind while writing The Odds.
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There’s no magic and no Aslan in The Odds … but there is Marko Marinus.
Marko was Eldridge’s best friend in the Narsyan Order, and when El disrupts the Order’s sacred ritual, Marko casts the deciding vote to expel him. This sires a grudge that lasts a lifetime, so when time came for me to pit Eldridge against another rook in the Xiang tournament, I invented Marko as the ultimate opponent. Everyone in Dedrick knows about this old grudge, or as another character says:
“You and Marko have some old odds to resolve … Eldridge and Marko Marinus will battle to the death atop a mountainpeak, inside the Narsyan conventuary — and those old odds will finally be paid in full, one way or the other.”
Everything in the story points toward this being a final showdown between two men who hate each other, but what The Odds presupposes is:
Maybe it isn’t?
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What if Marko was trying to say he was sorry?
Over the course of my writing career, I’m proud to say I’ve managed to pull off some decent twists in my novels. Some of these have relied on laughable, horseshit devices like amnesia, but regardless, when I’ve successfully fooled my audience, I’ve always written my twists the same way: I write everything up to the twist as if the twist has already been revealed.
In the case of Marko Marinus, here are some of the facts Eldridge learns in the lead-up to their battle:
- Eldridge starts the novel very ill, but is suddenly cured. (More on this in a moment.)
- Someone tells Eldridge that Marko secretly cured him of his illness.
- Eldridge knows that Marko is capable of this feat; as a Narsyan chieftain, his blood is endowed with vast palliative properties.
- Marko joins the Xiang tournament, an unusual move that runs contrary to the Narsyan ethic.
All of these facts are essentially known and accepted as true, but to Eldridge they’re proof positive that Marko’s out to exact a long-expected revenge on him.
Why? Well, his misunderstanding emanates from the book’s opening action, which dovetails with one of the book’s central themes. It’s a theme that, when I realized it had sprung up all through my novels, filled me with a lot of sadness.
I write about a lot of depressed people.
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I know that’s heavy, and I don’t mean to bring the mood down, but Air Holloway, Oda McGaw, Beverly Thudercracker, Johnny Major, Coach Claxton, Seth Aegis, Barry Stix—all of these characters grapple with longterm depression to varying degrees. Later in Strong Bones, I’d find this theme bubbling up again in Justin Johnson, Hiram Gresham, Jason Sutton, and most vividly in Corrie Gresham.
A lot of these characters have also tangled with even more difficult feelings that I hesitate to name. Let’s just say I’ve written about a lot of folks who feel more useful when they’re dying.
Eldridge begins this novel in the last stages of a death he’s trying to orchestrate.
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Let’s see if I can explain this nonsense: in the post-deadblast world, a caste of bookies runs everything—the titular “Odds.” Eldridge owes a ton of money to one, so he places what’s called a “deathday” wager, where he tries to predict the exact day he’ll die. It’s like a big life insurance policy, but it’ll only pay out if he dies on a specific date.
Before the events of the novel, Eldridge has learned he’s terminally ill. He works with a physician to keep himself alive until the Fourth of July, the day he’s wagered on. (There’s the Fourth of July again!)
But when the book starts, Eldridge learns he’s been cured. When he finds out that Marko, his lifelong enemy, cured him, he mistakes it as an act of retribution.
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Setting aside the convoluted genre goofballery of this setup … man. That is fucking bleak. I’m reminded of a lovely review I got. I forget where, and I’m paraphrasing, but the sentiment was This book says it’s a comedy, but wow, this is a really sad story.
This sets up the showdown with Marko, where Eldridge learns the truth at the last moment, but not before he’s already struck a mortal blow against Marko. In his dying moments, they share this exchange:
Marko Marinus, the unspoken high chieftain of the Order of the Narsyan, looked into his friend’s eyes and spoke in the simple, sing-song cadence of a child, his voice a full octave higher.
“Because my friend was sick.” His voice returned to normal: “And I thought … I thought … if I can cure him, I can take a step toward making amends for failing him all those years ago.”
“Oh, my god. Fuck. Fuck. Marko, if you were sorry, why didn’t you just tell me?”
Marko’s spirit surged: “I am a Narsyan. The day I express my contrition with words instead of actions is the day we pull down this great conventuary stone by stone.”
Eldridge surveyed the scene around them. “I think I may have beaten you to it, old buddy.”
Marko gave a bloody chuckle. “So it seems. My friend, I would consider it a high honor if you would absolve me before I depart.”
Eldridge blinked owlishly at him.
Marko smiled. “Forgive me?”
Eldridge slapped his forehead. “Of course. You’re forgiven. I forgive you.”
Marko’s eyes lost focus. “I can’t see.” He inhaled sharp enough to suck his lower lip into his mouth. When his lip came back out, it was quivering. Tears beaded at the corners of his eyes. He spoke one last time: “El, I would gladly trade the life I’ve lived to spend one more day with you, even if it meant I would only live one more day.”
His hand fell limp. Eldridge set it on his chest and stood.
Remember how I said you never lose your “pansting” brain? It manifested in this scene, which I had planned out—and basically fully written—in my outline. But when I sat down to write it, I realized an obvious plot hole:
Why didn’t Marko simply say he was sorry? The answer sprang out of me, bolstered by wackadoo invention and buoyed entirely by the governing moral fiber of a Narsyan: they speak with actions, not words.
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I love Marko. He hovers on the periphery of this story, but once the big twist’s been revealed, it opens up this lovely alternate narrative that’s been unfolding behind the scenes. The Narsyans aren’t supposed to travel to the cities, but Marko went to Dedrick, joined the Xiang tournament, and worked out a means to cure Eldridge in secret. Another character speaks of him:
“The rumortrysts speak loudly of the great feats of Marko Marinus, so when I saw him wandering the streets of under-Dedrick, I took notice.”
I’ve got two more deadblast books to write. It fills me with such joy to think of Marko, physically imposing but nervous to be away from home, suddenly finding the wherewithal to try and make amends with his old friend. Maybe a flashback to these moments will make it into one of those books.
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In addition to the grim themes I mentioned earlier, The Odds also marked the emergence of a guy who looked back over his formative years and saw a lot of friends lost to either death or various fallings out. It comes up early in the book when someone asks the protagonist:
“Have you ever lost a best friend, Mr. Eldridge?”
“Sure I have. A few of them.”
“How many?”
The redhead’s eyes rose as he did the math. “Four or five, at least.”
“That’s a lot.”
“I don’t know if it’s a lot or a little. Feels like a lot. Sometimes.”
There’s a lot more I could write here, but I need to keep moving.
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Let’s get back to pantsing versus plotting. One phenomenon I’ve written about before are what I call “darkhorse characters.” These are characters who begin very simply in the composition process but who blossom into fully blown leads. One of those is another Narsyan chieftain, Pell Yannick. Pell appears mostly in flashback as a lifelong nemesis to Eldridge, but near the end, he proves to be surprising:
Eldridge told him everything. He walked him through the specifics of his debt and the deathday wager and the rules of Xiang. He explained how Goldmist had manipulated him, and he explained why he murdered Pell’s fellow Narsyan chieftain and his own best friend. When he was done, Pell was still sitting with his legs crossed, staring at his hands with a knit brow. He stood and extended his hand to Eldridge, who he helped to his feet.
“The Order of the Narsyan stands ready to assist you.”
Eldridge forearm-wiped snot from his nose. “What? You believe me?”
“You should realize that your breed of insolence is blood-related to a form of arrogant honesty I’ve never been able to stomach. In all your years in this order, you never once told me a lie, much to my chagrin. Why would you start lying now?”
The very density of the air around Pell seemed to change for Eldridge, who hoped with a far-off heart that he might be in the process of replacing one of his missing best friends. He ignored the bright feeling for the time being and pressed on.
Unearthing Pell over the course of this book and bringing about his turn at the end was one of this project’s great pleasures, and this sentence remains one of the my favorite that I’ve ever written: “The very density of the air around Pell seemed to change for Eldridge, who hoped with a far-off heart that he might be in the process of replacing one of his missing best friends.”
I’m not much of a poet. You could go through that line and make edits, I suppose. Cut the “very.” Find a more elegant turn of phrase than “in the process of.” Whatever. It’s always felt righteous to me, and “hoped with a far-off heart” is, to me, about as perfect a sentiment as I’ve ever expressed.
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Earlier I said that The Odds has a false climax. Well, once Marko dies, the book’s chief villain—a guy named Jeb Goldmist—is pretty much fucked. I love the final battle, but it’s not the best part of the book.
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I could wax poetic about so much of this book, but I want to move on and talk about my experience getting representation for it, how it all went wrong, what it was like, and what I learned from it.
I wish I could say my experience could translate to actual advice, but I honestly don’t think it’s relevant anymore. The entire entertainment industry—music, movies, books—has changed too much.
But all the same, I’ll offer what advice I can. Next time.
Robert J. Peterson, Author 