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lie, okay? One so ingrownthat now I’m even telling it to myself. He asked, all right, and I always said yeah, I was working on a new book, it was going good, real good. I was tempted more than once to tell him I can’t write two paragraphs without going into total mental and physical doglock—my heartbeat doubles, then triples, I get short of breath and then start to pant, my eyes feel like they’re going to pop out of my head and hang there on my cheeks. I’m like a claustrophobe in a sinking submarine. That’s how it’s going, thanks for asking, but I never did. I don’t call for help. I can’t call for help. I think I told you that.
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    From my admittedly prejudiced standpoint, successful novelists—even modestly successful novelists—have got the best gig in the creative arts. It’s true that people buy more CDs than books, go to more movies, and watch a lot more TV. But the arc of productivity is longer for novelists, perhaps because readers are a little brighter than fans of the non-written arts, and thus have marginally longer memories. David Soul of Starsky and Hutch is God knows where, same with that peculiar white rapper Vanilla Ice, but in 1994, Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Norman Mailer were all still around; talk about when dinosaurs walked the earth.
    Arthur Hailey was writing a new book (that was the rumor, anyway, and it turned out to be true), Thomas Harris could take seven years between Lecters and still produce bestsellers, and although not heard from in almost forty years, J. D. Salinger was still a hot topic in English classes and informal coffee-house literary groups. Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creativearts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled onto the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.
    What the publisher wants in return, especially from an author who can be counted on to sell 500,000 or so copies of each novel in hardcover and a million more in paperback, is perfectly simple: a book a year. That, the wallahs in New York have determined, is the optimum. Three hundred and eighty pages bound by string or glue every twelve months, a beginning, a middle, and an end, continuing main character like Kinsey Millhone or Kay Scarpetta optional but very much preferred. Readers love continuing characters; it’s like coming back to family.
    Less than a book a year and you’re screwing up the publisher’s investment in you, hampering your business manager’s ability to continue floating all of your credit cards, and jeopardizing your agent’s ability to pay his shrink on time. Also, there’s always some fan attrition when you take too long. Can’t be helped. Just as, if you publish too much, there are readers who’ll say, “Phew, I’ve had enough of this guy for awhile, it’s all starting to taste like beans.”
    I tell you all this so you’ll understand how I could spend four years using my computer as the world’s most expensive Scrabble board, and no one ever suspected. Writer’s block? What writer’s block? We don’t got no steenkin writer’s block. How could anyone think such a thing when there was a new Michael Noonan suspense novel appearing each fall just like clockwork, perfect for your late-summer pleasure reading, folks, and by the way, don’t forget that theholidays are coming and that all your relatives would also probably enjoy the new Noonan, which can be had at Borders at a thirty per cent discount, oy vay, such a deal.
    The secret is simple, and I am not the only popular novelist in America who knows it—if the rumors are correct, Danielle Steel (to name just one) has been using the Noonan Formula for decades. You see, although I have published a book a year starting with Being Two in 1984, I wrote two books