The Novel Lip Hooked — Endgame
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This post is the first in a series devoted to documenting my personal experience with a project begun in August, 2014 and nearing the endgame in mid-October, 2015.
I’ve elected to introduce the series with what might be described as the Epilogue for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that to tell the whole story now would require more time than I have at the moment, and even if I did, it might be too soon in terms of obtaining some distance and perspective on the months of effort required to reach this point.
On November 6, 2015, which would be Chris Gardner’s 70th birthday had he not lost a long and courageous battle with cancer in the early morning hours of April 24, 2015, a book launch event is scheduled in Florida for his novel Lip Hooked.
I am truly honored to have participated in the extraordinary efforts of a number of people to place a copy of Chris’s novel in his hands the week before he passed, and soon to finally publish it as an eBook and paperback.
If you’d like to get a preview of this remarkable action/adventure debut novel, stop by Booth #506 at the Texas Book Festival, where my friend, fellow writer, and small publisher Lara Reznik will be more than happy to take your pre-order.
For this introduction I offer the following screenshots of the 3-D presentation of the Lip Hooked paperback cover:
An important part of the journey of how Lip Hooked has come to publication will not be told by my good friend, Tosh. Bottom line, he is not a man who toots his own horn. So, I’ll toot it a little for him.
Tosh received this manuscript from me in Word Perfect. There was little formatting, with lots of garbage symbols #$%^&, and plenty of structural, developmental and copy editing issues. He was told I planned to have it professionally edited, but I wanted him to give me a guesstimate of the cost to have him format the book and create a cover. The goal was to put a book into a longtime friend, author Chris Gardner’s hands before he died of colon cancer. I told Tosh that Chris only had weeks perhaps a few months left, and we needed to move very quickly.
A few days later, I received a call from Tosh who told me that he’d discovered there was a “gem” of a story buried in all the garbage, and he personally wanted to take it on as a project to edit the book to a point where it was close to publishable. He then spent endless hours in a labor of love turning this mess of a manuscript into a true masterpiece of a book.
Tosh used a gentle editor’s touch to preserve Chris’s style and voice. He worked under the added pressure of beating the clock of Chris’s mortality. This meant Tosh basically dropped most of the other things going on in his life and worked on editing the book full time.
I am happy to report that the book was not only placed in Chris’s hands a week before he died, but he loved everything Tosh had done with the editing, and was enamored by the gorgeous cover Tosh created from a photo he’d found on the internet. I might add that Tosh and I searched from New England, to Australia and ironically back to the Florida Keys to track down the photographer, Richard Gibson, and gain permission for its use.
I arranged a meeting for Tosh and Chris to speak on the phone a few days before Chris died. The two were bonded by their love of writing, history of military service, and passion for their former careers. In Tosh’s case it was aviation, in Chris’s it was being a deep sea fishing captain.
After Chris lost his battle to cancer last April, the book was in decent shape but Tosh did a whole lot more editing. Then I hired a professional copy editor to proofread it and Tosh submitted it to a number of his writer and aviator friends to “crowd-source” the final product. Once again, he spent a lot of time implementing all the excellent feedback from his beta readers.
Bottom line, while this marvelous book was written by my dear deceased friend, Chris Gardner, it would not have been possible without the time and dedication put in by my other good friend and colleague, Tosh McIntosh.
One last footnote: I want to thank Tosh’s wife Ann McIntosh for her patience, support, and sacrifice of time with her spouse so he could work on this project.
Lara Reznik
Author of The Girl From Long Guyland & The M&M Boys
CEO – Enchanted Indie Press.
At one point in my twenties, I spent some time in Florida as a working hand aboard a commercial net boat, based out of Destin on the west coast–back when that was still legal. Chris Gardner’s “Lip Hooked” captures that feeling better than anything I’ve ever read on the subject of blue-water fishing. Even better than Papa Hemingway, in respect to his knowledge and love of the sea and his beloved Keys.