With Hearts and Spades, I have completed one of my life’s milestones of writing a novel. I’m also a believer that everyone has a book in them. I can promise that if you write a novel and really think about what you are doing, the project will fundamentally change your life and outlook on the universe.

One of the first realizations that I had in writing Hearts and Spades was that I was creating a work that would likely outlive me. What would I tell my children and grandchildren who might brave to read my work? Such musings weigh heavily on any contemplative writer. Also, because writing a novel takes time, your friends and family will very quickly become aware that you are writing a novel. If you have children, you will find bright eyes staring at you by the dinner table exuberantly saying things like, “You’re writing a book! When is it going to be done? What’s it about?” At that precise moment in time, you could find yourself committed to completing your project, because you do not want to be that person who started writing a book but didn’t finish. You will owe it to your children and friends to finish what you started – it’s an implied commitment of sorts (it was to me).

Many people ask me how long it takes to write a novel. I think that it could take a lifetime to write a novel, or years. In my case, Hearts and Spades was entirely written in the fall of 2014. I then suffered from appendicitis in December of 2014, and editing the work took another few months before the first edition came out. I have an entirely separate 75,000-word manuscript that I wrote in a matter of a couple of weeks, working entirely by moonlight. That said, this second manuscript still requires a ton of work and might not see the light of day for years or decades. A book can be written extremely quickly. It depends on whether you know what you want to say.

I started writing Hearts and Spades as a novel that would take place in two-time settings: WW2 and the 1950s. As I started to write, the 1950s chapters took on a very hard-boiled New York police detective flavor while the WW2 chapters took on a 1920s Saturday Matinee global adventure flavor ala Tarzan or Indiana Jones. Slowly, I found myself writing more chapters about the WW2 storyline than the 1950s storyline and before long I had shelved the entire 1950 subplot – who knows, those shelved chapters might reappear at a later date in another story. The story that I finished was a globe-spanning tale of spies and germ warfare set in 1936-1937 – this was all written long before COVID. The sequel will take us closer to WW2 and will focus on Allied technological supremacy, the nuclear age, and the exodus of scientists out of Germany during those times – all with a focus on Asia-Pacific, a favorite setting for me. I still have no ideas on what the third and final installment of Hearts and Spades will focus on.

Friends ask me when I will finish the sequel to Hearts and Spades or whether I have other manuscripts. The short answer is that I already have a sequel to Hearts and Spades firmly in my mind, but I have only committed about five chapters of it to pen and paper. I have also written other manuscripts that a couple of very close friends have read. The challenge I have in completing those projects is one of ample time to focus. It takes a lot of dedicated long blocks of time to focus and write (spans of weeks or months), time that is sadly in short supply. It’s hard to write a night when so much else is going on in life. One day, I hope to have enough time to bring those projects to fruition. For now, I’m content with knowing that I was able to get one 430-page, 132,000-word, novel out the door. I know I can write books, because I have written a novel.

Now, marketing and selling a novel while maintaining a career is proving to be far more daunting than writing, editing, and publishing one. I’ve provided a link to Barnes and Noble if you’re interested in taking a read of my work, but, if you’re a friend or think that you’ll become my friend, don’t buy it, I’ll send you a free signed copy. With that, you might begin to see why I’m the world’s worst book marketer – I give away my work. I can’t help it. A famous author once gave me some great advice, “Never ever let a friend of yours buy your book, always give them a copy,” and, fortunately I have many friends. Hearts and Spades has not yet sold a million copies so I cannot move into Robin’s Nest in Hawaii just quite yet, but all novelists are allowed to dream about what still might be.