Newbury Township sheep farmer David Snively's novel, "In the Zone," is due to be published electronically and in paperback within the next week or so.The…
Newbury Township sheep farmer David Snively’s novel, “In the Zone,” is due to be published electronically and in paperback within the next week or so.
The former Newbury Township trustee has been working on his first book for a couple of years and drew from his experiences and relationships in a small town to develop and populate “In the Zone.”
The rest he drew from his vivid and quirky imagination.
“When I was elected trustee in Newbury, I became fascinated with zoning,” he said during a recent interview. “It was something I knew nothing about.”
When he took his seat on the board in 2008, Chairwoman Jan Blair assigned him as board liaison to the zoning department, run by zoning inspector Karen Endres.
Snively took his new job seriously and credits Endres with her patience.
“I spent a lot of time tagging along,” Snively said.
One day, they inspected a building on a lot that was supposed to be vacant. It turned out to be a small clubhouse, but his imagination turned it into a fictional meth lab with explosive results.
“That became the basis of the first short story, ‘In the Zone,'” he said.
Snively altered the name of the town to Newburn. While borrowing personalities from his experience as trustee, he changed his characters’ names and was encouraged by his wife, Heather, and friends.
Endres was his main model, but other characters based on local Newbury Township people included township employees, a newspaper reporter and the county sheriff.
Any evil characters can be attributed to his imagination.
“The other characters, particularly the nefarious ones, have no local counterparts. They are entirely fictitious,” Snively said.
After writing and rewriting, he entered the story in a contest, where it received an honorable mention and was published in a collection of submitted stories.
“I was told ‘The only thing I didn’t like about it was that it’s over — write more,'” the author said.
It was the motivation he needed. He started chapter two shortly after losing his bid for a second term on the board of trustees and wrote the last chapter about a year later.
“I had what I thought was the final draft,” Snively laughed. “Then I hired an editor. It took another year.”
Sarah Nell Summers, a freelance editor in Florida, who also writes and teaches music, worked with him via cell phone and email, sometimes three times a week.
“We went through it line by line, word by word. It was an experience,” he said.
‘In the Zone’ changed dramatically.
“People I thought were great characters are no longer in the book,”?he said.
Others he had introduced and dropped from the first draft were looped back into the story to neaten it up and make readers happy, Snively said.
His relationship with Summers bloomed and he credits her approach to the completion of the novel.
“She’d call me up and ask, ‘Do you have some time and are you in a good mood?'” he recalled, adding, however, she made the rewriting process rewarding.
“Every session I had with her, I came away thinking, ‘This is a better book,'” he said.
As of Monday, “In The Zone” was uploaded to the CreateSpace network and will be reformatted so it can be downloaded by readers to Kindle e-books in Europe and the U.S., Snively said.
Hard copy is available through Amazon for $14.
