Vermilion Drift, the 10th in the Cork O’Connor series, goes on sale in bookstores everywhere tomorrow. This is a book that has surprised the hell out of me.

I don’t know about most authors, but me, I’m almost never a good judge of the quality of what I’ve written. Except for one or two rare exceptions, by the time I’m finished with a manuscript—all seven or eight revisions—and my editor and I are in agreement that the work is ready for production, I’m usually sick to death of it. The story is lackluster, the writing pedestrian, the twists all telegraphed well beforehand. Everything about the project feels flat. I want nothing more to do with it, and am so ready to move on to the next story, which I’m always certain is bound to be better than the piece of dreck I’ve wasted the last year writing.

Vermilion Drift was no exception. I remember thinking at the end of the process that eventually every author has to turn out a piece that falls short, and I figured this was the piece for me. There were good elements in it, to be sure—the remarkable Iron Range setting, the deliciously dark secrets from the past of Cork O’Connor, the wonderful role Henry Meloux played. But overall, I thought I’d come up shy. All I could see were the weaknesses, the words that didn’t quite say what I’d hoped they would, the obvious manipulations, the floppy motivations, the potential for disaster.

Then I saw the finished book. Oh, is it lovely. One of my favorite covers. And then the reviews started rolling in. Starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. Kirkus, for god’s sake! They never like my stuff. Last week, I got word that the book will be reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, and is being considered as a People magazine book pick. We even got a call from Hollywood.

So now I’m stoked. What’s changed? Nothing, really, except I’ve been able to step back from the work and look at it through different eyes. With a little distance—and with the encouragement that comes from a good critical response—it’s easier to see the strengths of the story instead of focusing all that I know falls short.

No work is perfect, but at the outset we always believe somehow we can make it so. In the end—to maintain sanity—an author needs to learn to come to terms with the great potential and the ultimate reality. Kind of like loving someone even though there are things about them that drive you nuts.

My father is eighty-six years old. He has a bad heart, bad lungs, bad kidneys. He uses a cane or a walker to get around. His memory is becoming an issue. He lives with me and my wife in a cozy little area of his own in the lower level of our home. He spends a lot of time these days sitting and staring and remembering.

For much of his life he taught high school English. He was a good teacher, in part because he didn’t just deal with academics. He taught about life in so many of its aspects: ethics and relationship and individual responsibility. He made a difference in the lives of a lot of kids. I say this not just because I’m his son, but because over the years he’s heard from a number of former students who have said basically the same thing. I went to my high school class’s 40th reunion last year, and I heard from a lot of my former classmates about the remarkable influence my father had on them.

Recently, I received an email from a woman who’d been taught by my father and with whom I’ve been out of touch for over forty years. She found me on Facebook, and a major part of her message to me concerned my father. I’ve asked her permission to include her words in this blog posting. This is what she wrote:

“I especially want to tell you what I wished I could have told your Dad over the many decades of my life, had I known where to find him. To this day, ‘Mr. Krueger’ remains one of those special people in my life. He was my favorite teacher and my definition of the ideal teacher. I thought he was a the most wonderful, gentle, respectful and ethical human being when I was his student, and I know I was lucky to have had the experience of knowing him at that time of my life. At so many times since, something he said will echo in my mind. Or the memory of him leading a class discussion while leaning against the windowsill at the side of the room, or walking through the hall or into the classroom with that purposeful but gentlemanly stride of his, will pop into my head for some reason. Given that he was a father of 4 and a husband, with the same demands, chores, and financial constraints most of our families faced in the 60’s, his constancy of respectful and intelligent discourse with classrooms full of teen-aged emotions, preoccupations and intellect seems even more remarkable. At the last reunion, Jerry Jacques said he had heard that Mr. Krueger had passed away the year before. It was wonderful to see your photo of your Dad on Facebook, and my heart warmed to see that familiar smile of his. I hope that on the other side, when people think of us with strong feelings, our spirits can witness and understand what our lives here have meant to others. I imagine him there, smiling with astonishment, often.”

Brett Favre just announced that he’s going to return for another year as quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings. It’s been reported that he could earn as much as 28 million dollars this year. I don’t mean to take anything away from Brett. He’s a good quarterback and fun to watch. But $28,000,000?

When my father taught school, he worked summers at other jobs, as did most teachers, in order to make ends meet. People don’t become teachers because they get paid well. And in the end, maybe that’s the point of this post. We give our athletes—and our actors and our celebrities—outrageous sums to entertain us. But the people who make a real difference in our lives—teachers and ministers and nurses and cops and librarians—often scrape by on what we pay them. There’s something abysmally out of whack in our priorities.

Ask my father if he would have done things differently—been a pro quarterback, maybe, or Hollywood star—and he’d tell you that what he received for all that he gave was worth more than money. And what he gave was invaluable.

When you read the work of a fine author, what you see, generally speaking, appears flawless and flowing, as if it came naturally and without a lot of struggle.  Don’t you believe it.  Every author battles to get a work from their imagination onto the page.

I’m working on a novel right now.  When completed, it will be the eleventh in the Cork O’Connor series.  The title is Northwest Angle.  The book is set in one of the most remote areas of Minnesota, and the story, as I’ve conceived it, is a convoluted situation of misunderstanding, mostly as the result of prejudice.  People die and the where the finger of guilt points—with support of the evidence—is at the wrong man.  Even Cork buys into the local prejudices.  Add to the pot(boiler) some ruthless smugglers and a foundling child whom death follows like a shadow and you have the general ingredients of the story.

So I have a notion of what’s going to occur.  I know, more or less, the A, B, C of things.  What I’m struggling with is the information and occurrences that will naturally connect the plot points.  And therein lies the struggle.

In the past, I’ve usually outlined a book, or at least thought the plot through significantly, so I’m almost never worried about the dreaded question that keeps many mystery writers up at night: What happens next? But I’ll admit that in this manuscript I’m flying by the seat of my pants.  I struggle with chronology, structure, characters (way too many in this one, I fear), motivation.  In essence, everything.

I admit there are moments when I’m not sure I can pull it all together.  I think to myself, Every author is allowed a book now and then that falls short.  So maybe this is going to be the one.

I hate myself for even thinking this.  I don’t ever want to let myself or my readers down with an effort I didn’t put my full heart into.  So I struggle and lie awake at night and live with the fear of failure and every morning I get up and go to the coffee shop and give it my best effort.

I remember reading a note John Steinbeck sent to his editor along with the manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath. In the note, he apologized for the book he was delivering, feeling he’d somehow fallen short.  Even the greats have struggled.

Tim O’Brien, one of my favorite authors, published a marvelous book several years ago titled Into the Lake of the Woods.  It is, in many ways, a mystery, one that frustrates a lot of readers because at the end, the protagonist heads off into the labyrinthine archipelago of Lake of the Woods and is never seen again.

When you experience this lake, the 14^th largest freshwater lake in the world, with its 14,000 islands, you can see clearly how easy it would be to lose your way.  These days, most boats are outfitted with GPS that tell you not only where you are but also where the reefs and hidden rocks lie.  But in the old days, I’ve been told, it wasn’t at all uncommon to have to organize a search for a boat full of fishermen who’d gone off without a guide.

Our second day on the Angle, one of the guides for the Angle Inn Lodge, a terrific guy named Tony Ebnet, offered to squire us around Lake of the Woods.  We leaped at the offer.  Tony’s been coming to Oak Island for a lot of years, and has been guiding for the folks at Angle Inn Lodge for the last five.  He knows the lake pretty well and has a great repertoire of stories.

We headed off about nine in the morning, on a day that we were told was unusually calm.  The lake water surprised me.  It wasn’t crystal clear, as are so many of the lakes I know in the Arrowhead region.  It was the color of strong tea.  Tony told us this is from the algae that grows naturally in the lake, a phenomenon noted by the voyageurs over 200 years ago.  In Tony’s comfortable launch, we zipped first to Cyclone Island where there’s an unmanned custom station, and we checked in with Canadian officials.  Then we began a full day on the lake.

We visited Massacre Island, and Tony told us the grisly story behind its well-earned moniker.  We cut up narrow passages between islands, veered into picturesque inlets, motored along steep cliff faces, and hit the broad and unusually smooth water of some huge bays.

Around noon we stopped for lunch at Wiley Point Lodge, a remarkably modern enclave deep in the remote wilderness.  Finally we headed south, back toward the Angle.  Along the way, we visited Windigo Island, which is home to the Reserve 37 First Nations band of Ojibwe.  Our final stop was at Ft. Saint Charles, a reconstruction of the important fur trading center built in the early 1700’s.

I snapped photos like crazy and scribbled madly in the notebook I’d brought.  That day on the lake didn’t make me an expert, but it gave me an invaluable sense of the place where my next novel would be set.  By the time we returned to Angle Inn Lodge, Diane and I were sunburned, exhausted, and at the same time exhilarated.

I’ve talked with authors who use the Internet to research the locations for their novels.  I’m always more than a little skeptical about the quality of the job they do when creating a story’s sense of place.  Me, I have to go there.  And I’m always glad I did.

The Northwest Angle:  A geographic anomaly, a small triangle of American territory completely isolated from the rest of Minnesota, cut off from the United States by sixty miles of Canadian wilderness and the vast, mysterious waters of Lake of the Woods.

Lake of the Woods: One of the largest bodies of water on the North American continent.  Straddling the U.S. Canadian border, it is eighty miles long, sixty miles wide, and contains more than 14,000 islands, mostly uninhabited.  This is the best walleye-fishing lake in the world.  It has also become a notorious avenue for international smuggling.

Like many Minnesotans, I’d heard of Lake of the Woods and the Northwest Angle, but I’d never paid much attention.  These were places so far north that not many people—except really rabid walleye fishermen—ever went there.  But nearly a year ago, while casting about for a good seed idea for the next Cork O’Connor novel, I happened to visit the Kitchigami library system (think Brainerd) in northwestern Minnesota.  After one of the events, I went out with the librarian and some other folks for a beer or two.  For reasons I can’t now recall, talk turned to the Northwest Angle.  When I heard, really heard, about this place, all my sensibilities as a mystery writer tingled.  Here was a remote, little known area surrounded by a vast body of water that contained a gazillion, mostly wild islands, with an international border running through it.  In addition, much of the land was held by the Ojibwe.  I thought to myself, All kinds of criminal activities could go on out there, hidden among those islands. Honest to god, by the time I’d returned to St. Paul, I had a rough outline of the story already in my head.

But I’d never been to the Angle, as it’s called by locals.  And because I write profoundly out of a sense of place, I knew I had to visit the area and spend time on the Lake of the Woods.  So in mid-July, that’s exactly what I did.

Internationally speaking, the Angle is problematic.  After driving almost eight hours north from the Twin Cities, you hit the border just outside Warroad, Minnesota.  You have to pass through customs where, because of the events of 9/11, passports have become necessary.  Then you drive another hour on mostly back road, some of it pretty rugged, and, in the middle of a great woodland, cross the border back into the United States.  There’s no customs office at that point, only a sign noting the shift of nationality.  A few miles farther, you come to a place called Jim’s Corner, where there’s a little, unmanned booth with a video phone and instructions (a little vague) on how to call into U.S. customs to report your entry.  Sometimes the videophone works and sometimes it doesn’t.  For me, it didn’t.  So I entered the U.S. technically illegally.  I would later learn the horrible potential in this action.

We drove, my wife and I, for several more miles along the dusty washboard road through thick forest until we finally came to the Angle.  I was surprised.  In a place so far removed, I’d expected primitive conditions.  The Angle is remarkably modern.  Electricity, land phones, even Internet.  The only thing you can’t count on is cell phone reception.  It’s pretty hit or miss (mostly miss) up there.

At Young’s Landing, we were picked up by Deb of the Island Passenger Service and ferried out to Oak Island, where we’d made arrangements to stay at the Angle Inn Lodge.  Our wonderful hosts, Debra Kellerman and Tony Wandersee, greeted us and our Lake of the Woods adventure began.

In my next posting, I’ll tell you all about our exploration of that incredible lake and the graciousness of the folks who call it home.