Tess Gerritsen says her part was easy.

She was asked by her fellow Maine author Douglas Preston if she wanted to contribute a story to a collaborative, pandemic-set novel he was helping put together.

Preston told her a few of the noted writers involved, including Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Scott Turow, R.L. Stine, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange and Erica Jong. He said that he was going to take the stories – from a total of 36 authors – and weave them into one seamless novel.

“My reaction to Doug was ‘good luck,’ ” Gerritsen said from her home in Camden. “It was easy for me and the others; we just had to write our stories and not worry about what anyone else was doing. But Doug had to take all these different stories, different voices and make it all work.”

The finished novel is called “Fourteen Days.” It’s about the residents of a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, stuck in their building during the pandemic, eventually sharing stories with each other on the rooftop. Gerritsen will appear at an event at Mechanics’ Hall in Portland to promote the book on Feb. 6, the day it officially goes on sale. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Authors Guild Foundation, the charitable arm of the nation’s largest organization of professional writers.

Preston, a longtime resident of Round Pond in Bristol, came up with the idea for the book during the pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis, when everyone was either stuck indoors or fleeing to rural areas, reminded him of a novel he had tried to write about 30 years ago. That plot was about a plague that wipes out most of America, with a focus on people who fled to the woods of Maine.

That book went nowhere. Then, when the pandemic hit, Preston resurrected his idea and pitched it to other authors as a collaborative novel and fundraiser for the Authors Guild.

“Everybody told me it was a terrible idea,” said Preston, from his winter home in New Mexico. “Nobody thought it would be interesting to write about a bunch of rich folks who fled to safety. It would be better to write about the folks who got left behind.”

Some of his fellow Authors Guild members doubted whether so many authors could work together. Preston assured them they could, especially if they wrote what they wanted and somebody else wove the stories together. He volunteered for that job.

Preston worked with Atwood, who was the general editor on the project. She solicited contributions and laid down the one rule: the stories had to be written in the first-person. Then the stories started coming in, from authors of all ages who write in genres from nonfiction and science-fiction to romance and mystery.

“The logistics were kind of scary because we gave the authors basically no direction, which might have been a little crazy,” said Preston. “But we got this tremendous diversity of work.”

Preston said he didn’t want this book to feel like an anthology, where the authors each had their own stories under their own name. In this book, the reader is given no advanced notice of who wrote what. At the end of the book, however, there is a listing of the writers, with whose work appears in each chapter.

“We didn’t want to put writer’s bylines on their stories; we didn’t want to interrupt the flow,” said Preston. Plus, it’s more fun to read the whole thing and try to guess who wrote what.

Preston wrote the book’s frame narrative, connecting the stories on all of the 14 days chronicled in the book. His narrative involved a building superintendent who collects all the stories.

“The biggest challenge was ordering the stories. The first time, it just didn’t work; the characters were not interacting,” said Preston. “So we had to do it again.”

Turow, whose legal thrillers include “Presumed Innocent” and “The Burden of Proof,” was impressed with the way Preston brought all the stories together.

“Frankly, I thought it was a great idea as a way to attract readers, but it seemed like a difficult climb for whoever had to weave all this together. I was startled by what a fabulous job Doug Preston did,” Turow wrote in an email to the Press Herald. “Something larger emerges from Doug’s brilliant stitching, particularly the way COVID isolated all of us and the hungers for contact it created.”

Preston, 67, grew up in the Boston area and began as a child visiting Round Pond, where his grandparents had a farm. He lived there full-time for years, raising his children there but now spends winters in New Mexico.

Unlike some of the authors involved, Preston has a lot of experience collaborating on novels. Among his nearly 40 books – including more than 30 New York Times bestsellers – are the Agent Pendergast mystery-thrillers he co-writes with Lincoln Child.

Preston was a journalist and nonfiction writer before he became a novelist, and Child was his first book editor. When they work together, Preston said they do an outline and assign characters to each other. Then they write their sections.

“Then we swap and he rewrites me, which is annoying,” said Preston.

In “Fourteen Days,” Preston writes the narrative that ties the stories together. The book begins with the off-beat superintendent of a building called the Fernsby Arms, on the Lower East Side. She has just taken the job, weeks after the pandemic began, and is finding refuge by isolating on the building’s roof. Eventually, she’s joined by other tenants seeking fresh air, but there’s no conversation, at first. At some point, they began telling stories – tragic, gossipy, suspenseful.

They soon begin to question each other’s stories and wonder if any are about them, leading to tension and intrigue.

Gerritsen, 70, said “Fourteen Days” gave her a chance to write a story about something she had seen more than 40 years ago when she was doing her medical residency at a hospital in Hawaii. (To avoid giving away her chapter, we won’t say the specific person or incident that inspired her story.) Gerritsen, a native of California, became a doctor and practiced for about five years before taking time off to care for her young children. That’s when she started writing.

She and her husband, also a doctor, moved to Camden in the early 1990s, where she continued to pursue writing. Her reputation became established with her first medical thriller, “Harvest,” in 1996, which made The New York Times bestsellers list. Since then, she’s written in a variety of genres and is well-known for her Rizzoli & Isles series, about a police officer and medical examiner who team up for investigations in Boston. Those books were turned into a TV series of the same name, starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander, that ran on TNT from 2010 to 2016.

Her latest book, “The Spy Coast,” came out in November. It’s about a retired CIA operative living in small-town Maine, who has to deal with her past. Gerritsen said she is working on a sequel to that book, which is also being developed as a possible television series by Amazon Studios.

When Gerritsen appears at Mechanics’ Hall to promote “Fourteen Days,” she’ll read from the book, sign copies and talk about it with another Maine author, Bill Roorbach. Roorbach did not participate in the collaborative novel but was picked by the Authors Guild to join Gerritsen at this event.

Both Gerritsen and Preston say they think “Fourteen Days” will be fun for readers since it showcases the talents of so many writers in a really unique, unprecedented way. But they hope people will also appreciate it’s for a good cause. Money raised will help with various Authors Guild efforts, including fighting book bans, as well as helping authors who saw their incomes drop drastically in the pandemic. Most authors were not able to do live book events and that likely hurt sales, especially for less-established authors.

“A lot of authors make their money from lectures and tours, and they couldn’t do that,” said Preston. “So we hope this helps some folks and helps the Authors Guild with all its work.”

---

THE 36 AUTHORS OF ‘FOURTEEN DAYS’

Charlie Jane Anders, Margaret Atwood, Jennine Capó Crucet, Joseph Cassara, Angie Cruz, Pat Cummings, Sylvia Day, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Diana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, John Grisham, Maria Hinojosa, Mira Jacob, Erica Jong, CJ Lyons, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Mary Pope Osborne, Doug Preston, Alice Randall, Caroline Randall Williams, Ishmael Reed, Roxana Robinson, Nelly Rosario, James Shapiro, Hampton Sides, R. L. Stine, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Monique Truong, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rachel Vail, Weike Wang, De’ Shawn Charles Winslow and Meg Wolitzer.

Copy the Story Link