Kate Flora: Recently, I made the exciting discovery (which everyone else probably already knows) that I can put my manuscripts on my kindle and they read like any other book. So much fun. Also so helpful in seeing bad punctuation, missing words, awkward scenes, and things that just generally need to be rewritten. I started with some of the “books in the drawer.” Kindle lets me make notes, so I could see what I had to go back and fix. Now, of course I have a whole lot more revision to do than was already on my desk. I may be done with books that were “almost done” around about the turn of the next century.

Once I’d finished reading through The Darker the Night, Scarred, and Memorial Acts, just out of curiosity, since I hadn’t read it in many years, I loaded my first stand-alone novel, written as Katharine Clark. Steal Away was supposed to be my breakout book. I had a great new agent. He got me a big advance and the book was a book club selection. I went to New York to meet with the publishing team. They took me to an amazing restaurant and treated me like a queen. So very different from my experience with my first publisher (a post for another day) that I actually told them how wonderful it was to be treated well.

The publisher said—absolutely the first truth, if a cold-hearted one—the first true words I’d heard from a publisher. She said, “Ah, yes. But we can turn on you at any moment.”

I wasn’t discouraged. I was riding the high of possibility. My career was going to take off.  This would be my break out book. Alas, it did not. Another sad story for another day. But they did put some energy behind it and I enjoyed some of those perks like someone to escort me on a local book tour. All of that faded away, though. My agent didn’t like the next book, which after many rewrites was published in 2024 as Burn the Diaries and Run. And then the agent decided to stop agenting and go find himself.

I shoved Burn the Diaries in a drawer and started writing Joe Burgess police procedurals.

So what does all this have to do with the title of this blog? Only this. That for the last few days, I’ve been rereading Steal Away on my kindle and damn! It is a very good, fast-paced, compelling book and even though I wrote it, I found I couldn’t put it down. Which brings me, finally, to that title. I don’t think it’s just me, waxing nostalgic for my old book. I think at one point in this long, long, roller-coaster writer’s journey I’m on, I was a surprisingly good writer.

Or, as the Tess Gerritsen quote on the cover says: Beautifully written and heart wrenching…searingly memorable

And this: Full of real characters and raw emotions, simmering resentments and shocking revelations. Steal Away is a richly compelling mystery that twists and turns at a breakneck pace until its absorbing, thrilling conclusion. Katharine Clark knows how to write suspense. Palo Alto Daily News

I’ve been wondering whether other writers go through this. Whether there are times in the long career when they hit their stride, or their peak, and that’s the best writing they’ll ever do. I’m not whining. This is not me inviting you to my pity party. I’m only musing. I’m curious. Is it not that this book is better but that it’s different? Was it the story and characters? Was it the challenge of writing multiple points of view, which I’d never previously done? Was it the difference between crafting a whodunnit/whydunnit and turning instead to the suspense of a race against time?

I was lucky, with that book, to have a great and very demanding editor who forced me to work harder to develop my characters. It was a challenge to be asked to make a character I truly didn’t like, Steven, the husband in the story, more understandable. When I was done, I felt like I’d done a better job on him than on Rachel, the mother searching for her missing child. I had battles with her about things I wanted to keep in the book—some she won, some I did. And to prove to her that the genetic disease that had killed their first child was real and the way I’d described, I had to bring her medical articles. It was a wonderful treat to have such an editor. And then she died and I never got to work with her again.

Oh boy. What a trip down memory lane. I’d forgotten so much of that. I think, as I dig into all the helpful comments from beta readers on the new Thea, Until Death Do Us Part, I will be reminded to make it the best book I can, and not a good enough book that I’m in a hurry to get to the publisher.

If you’re a writer, have you ever reread an old book and had the thought “Wow that’s good. Did I really write that?’