BooksChatter: ✉ Concrete Smile

Today author Bernard Maestas takes over our blog to tell us about his latest novel, Concrete Smile (9 December 2016, Rebel ePublishers, 324 pages), a Crime Thriller.

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I Wrote a Book in a Week: The Saga of “Concrete Smile”

One of the most common questions I get asked is “How long does it take you to write a book.” I love answering that I wrote “Concrete Smile” in a week because, from one perspective, it sounds impressive. Then again, some might hear that I just threw it together, haphazardly, in a few days and that, certainly is not the case.

So, how long does it take to write a book? Where do you mark the beginning?

Is it the first inklings of the story in your imagination? I came up with scenes that would form the bulk of the opening chapters, plus the overall plot, when I was eighteen and knew everything. It was actually the second book of a series with a protagonist who never materialized. There were some holes in the plot that I never could fill in that time either.

Maybe it’s when you start writing? As I also love to tell people, three separate and distinct novels came together to form “Concrete Smile.” The first, I mentioned above. The second was originally a prequel to my “Internet Tough Guys” series (which I also finished at a rapid, 28-day pace) that was scrapped and rewritten as a standalone tale. I reused the two protagonists and some of the villains from that, but it wasn’t quite finished.

The third novel was really special to me. My first attempt at a mystery, “Bullet to the Heart” was an unmitigated disaster. But it was written as an outlet for my grief over a loved one’s death. That will always hold a special place in my heart. The protagonist of that novel went on to become “Concrete Smile’s” Kaitlynn Lockhart and informed the overall “film noir” tone I took when writing this one.

By that metric, I started “Concrete Smile” on February 1st, 2012, almost two years before I finished (October, 2014), when I began my “Internet Tough Guys” prequel. I choose to measure it from the Sunday I sat down, with nothing but an old idea and the scraps of my two failed manuscripts. I sketched an outline and started writing the first chapter of what would become “Concrete Smile.” Eight days later, to be exact, I had a completed draft.

A certain magic, it seems, overtakes me when I really get into a story. It happened first with the eponymous “Internet Tough Guys” prequel. The almost nonstop writing, the vivid images in my head that I managed to frame in prose, the rollercoaster of emotion I rode from inception to completion, are all impossible for me to recreate at will.

Finishing “Concrete Smile” broke my heart just as the events that inspired it did. The story is over. While it lives on in the novel I now share with anyone who will read it, I feel almost the same grief that led me to write “Bullet to the Heart.” That magic, that spark of life, is gone and I will never recapture it, even if I have success writing another novel.

How long does it really take to write a book? A lifetime.