TEN THOUSAND BOOKS: HOW MY DEBUT NOVEL CAME TO BE

I suppose this story begins long ago, in the early days of high school, when I once heard someone say “To be truly considered ‘educated,’ you must read at least ten thousand books in your lifetime.” Upon hearing that, I was deeply skeptical, not because I thought it was a low number (certainly not!), but because I didn’t agree that simply reading a book, or even a large number of books, was a good or practical measure of a person’s intelligence. After all, I was convinced that many (if not most) incredibly smart and gifted people in this world had never read, and never would read, such a volume of books, at least not from beginning to end. I remember shaking my head when the man was speaking. Then I gave the idea not another moment’s thought for a very long time.

I was unconvinced by his words also because, as a child, I didn’t read many books, not like other young people who would grow up to become writers. I didn’t spend time devouring the classics, or young adult fiction, or fantasy, or any other genre, for that matter. I was usually doing something on the farm, instead. My reading habits didn’t truly change when I went away to college either.  Sure, I spent many hours poring over (indeed, practically memorizing) textbooks and articles for my chosen fields of study (history and art history) in undergraduate school, but I still didn’t read many stories. I didn’t have the time.

Easily the busiest time of my life, at least up to that point, was my first year of law school. I remember well the first hour of the first day like it was only yesterday. That’s when another educated person stepped up to the microphone and said something most incredible. After welcoming the new class of first-year students, the speaker told us that law school would be the most rewarding and challenging experience of our lives and then foretold how the friends we’d make there would become some of the most cherished of our lives (well, that part was true), but eventually she moved on to a different topic, something more akin to a warning, really. Apparently, she and the other professors genuinely worried about our mental well-being during what was surely fated to become “the hardest year of your lives.” To ensure that we did not burn out, or work ourselves into a medical event, she suggested, “Sometime this semester, please take some time for yourself, and go relax a little; go see a movie.” Her line was delivered so quickly and expertly that I doubt it registered for most students in the audience, but it did for me. I understood her completely. When she said go see a movie during the semester, she meant just that: go see one movie in the next four months, but no more—because you won’t have the time to spare. And, boy, was she ever right.

In case you are wondering, the first year of law school was indeed the hardest thing I’d ever endured, and, yes, I survived it just fine. Interestingly, once the first year was over, law school became much easier. Well, perhaps not easier as much as it became more manageable. Law school has a way of rewiring the brain, to force acquiescence from its pupils, much like any intensive program, I suppose. For the next two years, in many ways, I ran on autopilot. I showed up to school every day, performed the work, and then went home to study even more. Eventually, twelve-hour days were no longer grueling or something to be dreaded. They became normal, more or less.

It was during this period of intensive study when something rather peculiar occurred. In spite of the great volume of reading I was doing for my studies, I found myself reading novels in my spare time. I read legal thrillers by John Grisham, Steve Martini, and David Baldacci, and action stories by Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, and Martin Cruz Smith, and historical mysteries by Umberto Eco, Caleb Carr, Iain Pears, and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. In my last year of school, in particular, I was knocking out book after book like I was making up for lost time.

One day around this time I finally remembered that man’s words from long ago: “ten thousand books.” Since I’d been on a roll that winter, having read several good books, I started to think, quite insanely in retrospect, “Yeah, I think I could read that many books.” After all, I’d been in college for nearly seven years by then; surely I’d read several hundred books, perhaps even a thousand. With such an amazing head start, I figured there were just nine thousand more to go. I quickly located my trusty calculator (the same one I still use today). At my current pace of one book a week, or four novels a month, I expertly hit the numbers on the keypad, then stared blankly at the results on the display. At my current rate, it would take me 187.5 years to read that many books! I was completely deflated. At that point, I’m sure I did something close to that emoji where the hand slaps the forehead. Well, it took only a few seconds for me to completely, and gladly, abandon any further notion of reading that many books. It was simply never going to happen.

Now that I was unshackled from the burden of aspiring to be “educated,” I continued to read books anyway, simply because I enjoyed them. It was about this same time, as my college career was drawing to a close and the bar exam was starting to loom on the not-so-distant horizon, that I first began pondering the idea of writing my own novel. I cannot remember the exact day it happened, or where I might have been at that very moment, as no great lightbulb exploded inside my brain. But somewhere along the line, you might say the stories I was reading began to enliven a sense of creativity within me that I never knew existed, at least not really.  Soon I was daydreaming scenes in my head (something about colonial America), and I even wrote down a few notes. But then something quite unfortunate happened: I graduated. After that, any plans to write a novel were abruptly put on hold while I studied for the bar exam; even after I passed it, there was soon another barrier to my plan, and then another, and then another, and before I knew it, twenty-four years of my life had passed by. (I still ask myself, Where did all the time go?)

Of course, over the years, I thought intermittently about writing a novel, but I never did anything about it, because I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about. Also, the obligations of life (family, friends, starting my own practice, the house, etc.) took their rightful place at the front of the line. Eventually, I resolved that if it happened someday, it happened, and if it didn’t, well, then, that would be fine too.

Then one day, without warning, the whole world changed in the blink of an eye, as all of us came face to face with COVID-19. Yes, that terrible virus that has affected so many families and altered our way of life. I won’t go into any discussion about the virus, but I will comment on one aspect of the global pandemic as it directly relates to my novel. Do you remember the rules that were in place when someone tested positive for the virus, or exhibited symptoms of it, or was exposed to another person infected with it? Yes, I’m talking about those dreaded quarantine rules. In the early days of the pandemic, we were supposed to stay home for two weeks to quarantine; then eventually it went to ten days, and then even later, to five days. Well, back in early 2021, I found myself in the midst of our first quarantine. My wife had contracted the virus, but I had not, which meant I was now the caregiver (quite a challenge, by the way, since I’m not a cook).

Looking back, the weeks I was at home with my wife were the longest stretch of downtime I’d had since graduating from law school twenty-some years before. To help pass the time while she was resting, I began conducting genealogical research on my wife’s family. It was something we’d talked about doing someday, and now seemed as good a time as any. So day after day, when I wasn’t helping her, I spent hours researching. I was able to trace her family lineage back ten generations, to the point when the first Pendleton family member set foot in the New World. When I was done with her family history, I switched over to my own, starting with my mother’s side. Eventually, though, as my wife got better, I had to wind down the research and do something I didn’t want to do: return to work.

Almost a year later, however, my wife contracted COVID again, and this time, so did I. We rang in the New Year (2022) from bed. It was not a pleasant first week for either of us, I must admit, but during the following week, I began to feel a little better, and once again I found myself in a familiar place. I was home, quarantining, with time on my hands. I quickly jumped back into the research. I started on my father’s side of the family, which didn’t take long since that history is rather short in America (from circa 1908). Next, I pivoted in a new direction, focusing on a favorite topic of mine: southeastern Kansas history, especially the wild days of the coal-mining boom in Cherokee and Crawford Counties at the turn of the twentieth century. Both sides of my family had settled there long ago, and it’s always been a special place for me. I also stumbled upon two sources of information that proved quite invaluable to me while writing my story. The first was the old coal-mining inspection reports from the State of Kansas, and the other was Poor’s Manual of Railroads. I spent countless hours studying both of them.

So, if you’ve made it this far down, I suppose you might be ready for me to finally explain how my debut novel came to be. The answer, strangely enough, is that COVID afforded me the time and opportunity to research two of my favorite topics (railroads and coal mining in Kansas), and from that research emerged ideas that I spun into a storyline. With such ideas rolling around in my head, I sat down and started to write. I wish my novel’s origin story were more romantic, or wittier, but it’s not. I got sick, and then I started to write. I began by writing just one scene, and then another, and then even more. Admittedly, almost nothing I wrote in the first few months has survived to the final draft, but that’s okay. What’s important is that once the ideas began to flow, they never stopped. They couldn’t stop. Nights, weekends, early mornings, I found myself writing almost every day for the rest of the year. And when the first draft was done, there were rounds of edits and rewrites, but eventually, the story was finally complete. I am very proud of The Crows’ Omen, and I am thankful for having had the opportunity to fulfill a dream, even though it came about during a strange and uncertain time in our nation’s history.

Nearly forty years have passed since I heard the remark about “ten thousand books.” I still don’t think it is a true or accurate measurement of human intelligence, although any person who actually were to read that many books would be, as far as I’m concerned, a very smart person indeed. But I also believe the man who spoke those words long ago didn’t really mean what he’d said, at least not so literally. On the contrary, it was his way of encouraging or motivating students to read books, because when you read books, whole worlds open before you. I get that now, and I think he was right, after all. We should all endeavor to read ten thousand books. Just don’t worry if you never get that far. I know I won’t.