Selling out
BY EVAN WILLIAMS ewilliams@florida-weekly.com
Sanibel resident Charles Sobczak was the writer who stopped writing. He more or less gave it up in 1984, for about 10 years.

Charles Sobczak C

"I think it was kids," he said. "Molly (Heuer) and I settled down…It's really overwhelming when they're little…my real-estate business was booming…I didn't make the time, period. I could've but I didn't."

Excuses, excuses - OK, good ones., but still. Sobczak's first novel, "Six Mornings on Sanibel," published in 1999, was an unexpected hit on that island, selling 3,000 copies in four months, then 5,000 more in the next seven months. Then it was picked up by Florida outlets of Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Waldenbooks and is also sold at Southwest Florida International Airport. Since then, he's published four more (two novels, one nonfiction work and one selected works), all of which have sold almost 50,000 copies.

And they've all been published by Indigo Press L.C., which he created, for the express purpose of publishing his first novel. In fact, his goal was to publish that one novel, sell 3,000 copies over three years, and fold the company. But the novel's popularity continues. Sobczak sold 600 copies just last February (amounting to about $5,000 in profit for its author).

"The book - not me - had so many people asking for it that Barnes & Noble contacted me," he said. "It's the book that drove it… 'Six Mornings' took on a life of its own."

His second effort, a suspense novel set in the Florida real-estate boom, "Way Under Contract," won the 2001 Patrick D. Smith Award for Florida Literature, presented by the Florida Historical Society.

"It's about overdevelopment," he said. "Like that ever happens."

Even now Sobczak's children are young - Logan is 19, Blake, 17. He is still settled down with Heuer and still works full time selling real-estate on Sanibel. So what got him started again?

"I cannot thank Ted Kircher enough," Sobczak wrote in the acknowledgments to "Rhythm of the Tides," a collection of his poems, stories, essays and lyrics, some written as early as 1969. It was published in 2001.

"Over five years ago, Kircher, then editor of the Island Reporter, asked if I would be interested in writing a weekly fishing column," Sobczak wrote. "Little did I realize that the fishing column would rekindle my passion for writing. Columns became novels. Novels that sold tens of thousands of copies. Novels that meant book signings, newspaper articles, speaking engagements, book festivals and the fulfillment of my lifelong dream of becoming an author."

Sobczak wrote a column for the Island Sun as well, in 1996-97, just before making the jump to novels. Conversations with Scott Martell, a friend at the Sun, lead directly to "Six Mornings," Sobczak said. They had started a writer's group called "The Drunk Poet's Society," which provided more literary stimulus.

"We considered it better than the Dead Poet's Society," Sobczak said. "It was easier to belong to, that's for sure."

It had been 20 years since he was involved with any kind of literary or otherwise artistic group like this. In the mid 1970s, Sobczak wrote lyrics for a band called "Easy Steam," which he said had a sound similar to another group of that era, "America."

They were a "three-piece coffee house group that toured much of the United States," he wrote in "Rhythm of the Tides." "…Our hair long, our libidos unbridled and our party meters at red line, those years with 'Easy Steam' were unreal.

"I have an unfinished manuscript about those crazed, Kerouac-inspired years sitting somewhere in the corner of my studio."

It's called "Constant Strangers." Actually, Sobczak wrote at least a few novels before publishing "Six Mornings."

"My first book bombed," he said. "I threw it in the garbage…In 'Six Mornings' I decided I wanted to focus on dialogue. And that's something I got much better at."

Listening carefully was one of the ways he got better. Like when he was on a trip with his family in the late 1990s.

"Dad, mom, who would ever want to live here?" Sobczak's son Logan had said on a car ride through Kansas, commenting on the flat, and to some therefore uninteresting, landscape.

The comment sparked a family discussion, but Sobczak's ultimate reply came later in an essay called "I could learn to love Kansas."

"I could learn to love Kansas as easily as I've learned to love this remote barrier island called Sanibel," he wrote. "I could learn to love the rocky coastline of Nova Scotia or the cold, damp rain forests of Seattle."

That's how he usually responds to life, he said - through writing. Maybe that's why he

k keeps returning to it. His latest novel, "Chain of Fools," a fictional memoir, is set to be r released this November or December. It is set in Sobczak's hometown, Duluth, M Minn., and is based on his f il family.

"It was a perfect setting for this bunch of losers," Sobczak said semi-angrily.

It's a black comedy, he said in the ilk of the Coen Brother's 1996 film, "Fargo." For the first time, warm weather and palm trees play no part.

"Florida isn't even mentioned," he said. "It's casinos and strippers…it's really pretty racy."

In the novel his grandmother, who was in real life a one-eyed bootlegger prostitute, burns to death in bed when she falls asleep smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette. It's a fine line between fact and fiction at that point, but the book aims at neither. Instead, it takes an unflinching look at one family's dirty laundry.

If you go

>>What: Charles Sobczak's Seminar on Writing, Printing and Marketing

>>When: 2 p.m., Saturday, April 12

>>Where: Barnes and Noble in the Coconut Point Mall

>>Cost: Free