How I Came to Write This Book: THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE

THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE is available at Untreed Reads.

HOW I WROTE THIS BOOK: The Same Mistake Twice

By Albert Tucher

In the summer of 2000 I signed up on a whim for a fiction writing class at the Union County College in Cranford, NJ. Our teacher, Tom Cantillon, gave us weekly writing assignments, and one week he had us write an action story. From somewhere came a mental picture of a man and a woman standing by a car parked on the shoulder of a deserted highway.

So far, so noir, but who were they? I decided that they were a cop and a prostitute, and just to keep things interesting, I made her the good guy. He wanted to kill her, and she needed to stop him.

I couldn’t think of a motive that would play in 1,500 words, until I made the police officer a woman also. The motive became jealousy over a man who had been paying Diana—I knew her name immediately—and ignoring the officer.

The story turned out well, but I realized that it was open-ended enough to become the beginning of something bigger. It is now the first chapter in my currently unpublished novel Do Overs. For a long time that book was the beginning of Diana’s main story arc.

But it proved a tough sell, even after my friend and colleague Elaine Ash, aka Anonymous-9, did some needed major surgery on it. Elaine suggested that it had too much challenging material, including a cop killing and some hard-edged, explicit sex, to be the reader’s introduction to the Diana saga. She wondered whether I had a story that could come before Do Overs.

In fact, I had a novella with a solid noir premise: a John Doe turns up after ten years in a shallow grave, with nothing to identify him except Diana’s phone number freakishly preserved in his pocket. The number is one that she used only briefly, when she was just weeks into her career as a prostitute. Rather than give the police a list of her clients—certain death for her business—she decides to investigate, with results that could be fatal for her.

That story came in at 16,000 words. Elaine read it and said that it needed more. For starters, it needed the viewpoint of Detective Dale Tillotson, who has appeared in many of my short stories, and whose friendship with Diana is tested by the case. I also realized that the story is about the return of old mistakes and old enemies which gave me my title, The Same Mistake Twice. The theme also enabled me to rethink and reuse some material from Do Overs that had ended up on the cutting room floor. The result came in at 31,000 words, and Jay Hartman at Untreed Reads said that accepting the story for publication was “a no-brainer.”

I love it when that happens. The confusion lifts, and I have to think hard to remember what it felt like. Next time, why don’t I just skip the hard part and go straight to the good stuff?

Let me make a note of that.