For the next seven years, I worked as a musician. My creative life mostly revolved around the songs I was writing. After my first two attempts at novel writing-one faintly literary and one a derivative mystery-I had realized that I needed to garner a little life experience before embarking on the serious phase of my art.

I had to see the world.

And I did, traveling all over the United States and overseas in Europe and Africa. Returning to the United States in 1976, I gave the whole singer-songwriter thing a good effort, forming a band-Johnny Capo (me!) and His Real Good Band-that performed regularly for about two years in the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, we weren’t too bad, and we worked consistently.

Gradually, though, the old familiar but long-suppressed urge to write fiction began to nudge out music’s prominence in my creative life. I started to write short scenes, to experiment with form, to sketch characters, to play with voice and point of view. No plot yet, but still.

Over the course of seven years, I’d written hundreds of songs, and I had become proficient at the craft. Ironically, though, the songs often left me creatively unfulfilled and frustrated. The expression that called to me more and more was fiction. I didn’t even know what I would write about, but I sensed that I was getting close to the point where I might have something important, something serious, to say. I’d almost died in Africa, I’d been cheated out of half a summer’s pay in Spain, I’d had friends die (and even commit suicide). Beyond that, I was married and thought I was getting some understanding of the complexities of adult relationships, of commitment and responsibility.

Hell, I was almost thirty!

Time was running out.

It was time to get serious about my art and my life. If I couldn’t start writing my literary books now, maybe I never would.

On my thirtieth birthday, I bit the bullet and told my band I was quitting to write books. Over about the next two months, I threw everything I had into my first “real” book. Based loosely on some of my experiences in Spain (for that old Hemingway feel), Sunburn fell rather neatly into the classic “first novel” matrix-sensitive young man sees the real world for the first time and comes of age while tragedy and political turmoil rage around him.

In Sunburn, I took the opportunity to write in all three persons. I experimented. I was daring, pushing the fictional envelope. It was heady and wonderful and literary and above all serious-this was clearly what I was meant to be doing with my life and my art. To top it all off, Sunburn went on to win the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for best novel by a California author, beating out Interview with a Vampire, among 280 other entries.

Next stop, Sweden. I began working on my Nobel acceptance speech. They’d never chosen a thirty-year-old before, but…

So I’d written the first of my literary works, the start of my oeuvre. While I waited for the publishing world to discover Sunburn, I wanted to keep the creative flame burning, so I quit my daytime job (always a bad idea) at Guitar Player magazine and immediately began another novel, Liner Notes, about some of my experiences in the music and performing world.

Flush with confidence, enamored of my own first-person writer’s voice, I produced this six-hundred-plus-page tome in four or five months and started sending it out to the same literary agents who, much to my surprise, had been turning down Sunburn with a frustrating regularity. My prizewinning literary book, they said, was not “commercial.”

And neither, by the way, was Liner Notes.

Well, what did they know? Great writers have always had to suffer for their art. This would be yet another life experience that would only enrich my later work. My critics would be sorry. I piss in the milk of these commercial cretins.

When Sunburn eventually found a paperback publisher, I realized that the $2,000 advance would not go very far toward giving me the time to write another comparable masterpiece. In the meanwhile, I had to make a living, and I decided that it was time to move to Plan B-to whip out a quick mystery under a pseudonym.

I began working on a novel about San Francisco ’s famous Zodiac Killer. Entitled Imperfect Knowledge, this book imagined that the Zodiac, who to this day has not been caught, simply retired from his first spate of killings and emerged from retirement a decade later, only to be pursued and apprehended finally by… private investigator Dismas Hardy.

“But wait!” you say. “Hardy is not a private investigator. He’s an ex-cop, yes. An ex-Marine, a father and husband and attorney.”

Yes, he is, all of those. But he wasn’t then. It wasn’t yet time for him to be born.

When I had finished the first draft of my Plan B non-literary mystery, featuring Dismas Hardy, I sent it out first to the publisher that had taken Sunburn, certain that my award-winning writing skills would carry the day and that Imperfect Knowledge, though nothing like Sunburn, would be snapped up as a matter of course. I would then take the money and live on that while I wrote my next literary offering, my next “real” book.

This was not to be.

My publisher passed on Imperfect Knowledge. After about ten more rejections, I went back and reworked the manuscript from beginning to end, cutting about two hundred pages, working mostly on plot and pacing issues that agents and editors had suggested.

Among the things I did not consider changing was Dismas Hardy, who happened to be the linchpin of the book. He was a private eye, very much out of the gumshoe mold, the kind of guy I didn’t want readers to have to think much about. He did what other PIs had done, in pretty much the way they had done it. My vision of mysteries in those days was that there was a kind of generic private-eye template, and if one followed it religiously, the hero would “work,” the book would get published, everybody would be happy. In this benighted view, originality wasn’t really part of the equation, and so I created a Dismas Hardy who, though he wasn’t an out-and-out cliché, failed to sustain interest.

I must have thought it was somehow “mysterious” that he was such a loner and had no history and, really, no life. No love interest. No pets, no kids, no friends. I was saving all that good human stuff for my serious work. And so I sent out another round of submissions with a completely revised manuscript (essentially a new book) and probably shouldn’t have been so surprised with the by now predictable results.

Although, of course, I was.

Devastated was more like it. I had tried to make a career in music and failed, and now I had written at least four complete manuscripts, only one of which had been published, and published as a paperback original at that. The heady confidence that characterized my attitude toward writing up until then was beginning to erode. Could it be that I wasn’t, after all, a genius?

But there seemed to be no other interpretation.

Sunburn had certainly failed to attract a readership. The other manuscripts-even the two drafts of my Plan B mystery-weren’t exciting anyone in the publishing business either. I started to consider the possibility that I wasn’t meant to be any kind of a writer after all. Even more portentously, I didn’t have any more ideas of what I wanted to write about, literary or otherwise.

Three years passed. I remarried well. I took a lucrative day job writing technical papers and put my literary aspirations aside. I was going to be an adult and wear a suit to work every day and not think about my earlier foolish ambitions.