The Kingmaker manuscript is finished. This is how it started.
I am thrilled, relieved, and to be honest, scared shitless that I have completed the final review of the Kingmaker. I put the final touches on it yesterday and sent it to Black Rose Writing for their review. It is now out of my hands. Save any edits or corrections that the publisher might request in the coming weeks, I am done forever working on the Kingmaker. It has been a long time coming.
I started writing The Kingmaker about three years ago. Well, that's at least when I started to make a concerted effort to write it. The actual idea for the Kingmaker probably goes back to my political consulting days at GQR - I remember writing down snippets here and there - but it was the beginning of 2015 that I made a quiet New Year's resolution to finally do what a writer is supposed to do, and that is write. No more excuses No more putting it off to next week or next month or when I finally felt like it. If I were ever to become a writer, godammit, there was no one who was going to do it for me, other than me.
As most side projects go, it was an off and on process for the first year. Life was busy, things got in the way, and I did my best to write. I got the prologue and the first few chapters down pretty quickly. Miles started to take form, as did David and Lisa. Enrique and his wife were still secondary characters at that time, but I knew I would have to write more of them into the story. I had general ideas of what each character would be like - some of them are loose interpretations of people that had been or currently were in my life at that time - and I had an even hazier idea of where I wanted the story to go. Most days I did find some time to write, though I was most productive when I was on one of my work trips. Planes, business lounges, hotel rooms, coffee shops, bars - those were my writing grounds. I like being in crowded places with my earphones in, listening to music, indirectly and unconsciously soaking in the atmosphere around me. That is when I am in my element.
“I already know what giving up feels like. I want to see what happens if I don’t.”
I remember getting up to a certain point in the story - where David and Lisa get to Bogota for the first time - and hitting a large, huge, ginormous freaking wall of writer's block. I had no idea where to take the story from there, or how to get out of that terrifying corner. Feeling lost and defeated, I put the manuscript away, dejected, thinking to myself that I would never get back to it. The frustration, and dedication needed to focus and write, I conceded, were too much for me. At that moment, I felt the Kingmaker was just another one of the many projects that I love to start, but never have the stamina to finish. My writing career ended before it even got off the ground.
But there was this little voice in the back of my head that would not let it go. I don't know who, or what, or from where it came, but it was there, and it was persistent.
"You are a writer," it would whisper to me.
"No I'm not!" I would scornfully scream back in my mind. "Just leave me alone!"
"Write," it would say. "Write."
"No!"
I made a few half-hearted attempts to get back into the story, but it just wasn't there. I was able to shut that voice down and push its encouragements out of my head. After a while, the voice went silent, I continued my normal life, and I stopped writing. More than a year would pass before I would pick up the manuscript again.
“There’s nothing to writing; all you do is sit in front of a typewriter and bleed.”
Fast-forward to Christmas 2016. A few weeks prior, my mom asked me what book I wanted that year. For as long as I can remember, she's always gotten me books. Could be for Christmas, my birthday, or just because - I could always depend on her to get me a book. I wasn't in a super strong reading mood then, so wasn't sure what to ask for. I told her I would browse the bookstore and see if anything caught my fancy. A couple days later I was at the Barnes and Noble, making my usual rounds through the New Releases, Biographies, History, and Sci-Fi / Fantasy sections, but nothing jumped out at me. I then thought to go take a look at books on writing. Why not? I thought, maybe something there will be interesting enough to at least flip through. And that's when I came across Stephen King's On Writing. I'd never read a Stephen King novel. My brother was a huge fan and said I would love the Dark Tower Series, but I never got into them. Regardless, I picked up this particular Stephen King book and started reading it. I couldn't put it down. I won't go into the details of the book here - you should go read it even if you have no intention to write a book - but suffice to say that the cobwebs and muck that had stalled my writing to a standstill washed away almost immediately. I bought the book and devoured it in two days. I opened up the Kingmaker manuscript and let it rip.
The next couple months - January to June of 2017 - were the most prolific of my life. I would spend hours a day writing. Sometimes I wouldn't write anything for the Kingmaker; rather, I would write the beginnings of other stories, or go on tangents about a certain topic in the news, or something I'd read or heard about that day. All that mattered was that I was writing.
"I told you. You are a writer," the voice was back.
"Maybe you're right. But I don't know how to finish this story."
"Don't stop now, Daniel. Just write. Trust the process. Write. Write..."
As I was getting close to the end of the manuscript, I hit a small bump on exactly how I wanted to wrap the story up. Looking for inspiration, and wanting to get out of DC, I bought a roundtrip ticket to Montreal for Memorial Day, hoping a change in scenery would push me through the end. That first morning in Montreal, I was sitting in a sidewalk cafe reading a book and having a cappuccino, when I swear to God, out of nowhere, the end of the Kingmaker came to me. I quickly drank the rest of my cappuccino, paid my bill, and retreated to my Airbnb. I spent the next two days holed up in that tight little apartment, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and finished the story. So while I've technically been to Montreal, I can't say I really saw much of it. I caught a plane back to DC that Monday morning.
The next couple of months were spent polishing the manuscript. I hired an agent who helped me format the text and clean up some of the grammar . We started shopping it around to publishers in October when we felt it was ready enough, and on January 1, 2018, I received the email I never dared thought to imagine would ever come - a publisher wanted to publish my book. I signed the contract and said I would give them the final manuscript by the end of the month. And here we are. The end of the month, and the Kingmaker is finished.
"Thank you, little voice."
"Don't mention it. But you know this is not the end, right? It's just the beginning."
"Yeah, I know. I'm excited. And scared. Where do we go from here?"
"Don't worry about it. Just write, Daniel. Write. Write. Write..."