The Roller Coaster

One of the best talks I've ever hear about writing was given by Wister Award winner, Win Blevins, at a Western Writers of America conference. It was superb. Even if the audio of his presentation had been recorded it would not have been adequate to convey his emotions to the listener.

The title was Give Your Heart to the Hawks. He spoke about the dangerous rise and fall of fortunes for those of us who write professionally for many years. He spoke of falling from the sky to the rocks below. He spoke of ascending once again on the wings of a hawk to a cloudless blue sky.

Writing is like being on a perpetual roller coaster. Yesterday I received an invitation to participate in a collection of novellas featuring myself and three other writers. I was absolutely thrilled. I said yes immediately. What a great boost.

Since the first of the year, I've been writing steadily, at my most workable pace of five pages a day, five days a week. I'm sure of the book. The plot is sound, and I'm comfortable with my characters. But I'm not sure how well it will be received by my editor.

So I'm happily putting the Work In Progress aside for a different Work In Progress. One that's a sure thing and requested by a publishing house that is terrific to work with.

Recently I watched a YouTube presentation that featured three agents from my new agency, Folio Literary Management. I was struck by the fact that agents experience many of the same problems faced by their authors. Agents might love a book and be shocked that their favorite editor does not.

Just doesn't. Isn't going to buy it either.

Agents are on a roller coaster too.

Nevertheless, it's winter now. And the rise of hope whether induced by hot-house tulips in the grocery store or an ego-boosting email from my favorite editor is mighty pleasant.

Spring is coming!

Fraud Mania

What on earth is going on? So many times lately I have opened my email and been greeted with another warning of a scam.

Last week, my church (St. Luke's Episcopal), cautioned the parishioners that someone was soliciting funds in the name of our priest.

Western Writers of America sent out a group email stating that someone named "Jacqueline" was fleecing members under the guise of our organization. My AARP bulletin has dire articles in both the magazine and the newsletter.

My week was capped with both a print and email warning from my local health organization about fake third-party billing.

Last year, I was invited to attend a conference in London (all expenses paid) and speak about my historical specialty: African American history. They were going to pay me $25,000. That was way too much money. Which I needed, but never mind. It was the wildly inflated amount that aroused my suspicions. If they had offered about $5000 for an overseas appearance I would have been inclined to take it seriously.

The letter was off. Just slightly. There were some phrases that were not constructed in accordance with standard American usage.

 Nevertheless, I was wistful enough to do some research. I was so happy, so flattered. They said such nice things about me. So I checked. The cathedral was real. The Bishop was real. And then I emailed the church secretary. Church secretaries know everything. It was a fraud. Their next step would have undoubtedly been the classic "ask" for my bank account number so they could mail my expense check.

I have no idea how beginning authors manage to pick their way around in the publishing industry. There were so many really crooked people when I was starting. It's a thousand fold now. There are fake agents who have never sold a book in their lives, fake publishers who expect authors to put up seed money, fake reviewers, fake publicists, etc. The list goes on and on.

I'm grateful for all the breaks I have received. Grateful for the wonderful friends I have made through the years. And more grateful than ever for stumbling onto a wonderful agency at the very beginning of my career who put me with editors who really care about books.

How I Found My Agent

Recently, I attended a Carteret County Writers Network luncheon and listened to a delightful author talk about her writing process and publishing. One of the questions she fielded was, “Is it true it’s impossible to get an agent unless you know someone?”

Obviously frustrated by agent rejections, he was implying that ‘the fix was in’ and that it was impossible to get an agent to represent you purely on the merits of your writing.

That wasn’t the case for me. Back in 2001, I found an agent in New York who, upon reading my second book, Pieces of Jake, signed me to a contract. I won’t tell you his name, but frankly, he was awful. He spent no time talking with me, had an editor suggest some minor edits to the manuscript, and shopped the book to only the top publishing houses in Manhattan. He never took my phone calls and never kept me informed about the publishers’ responses.

Nine months after we signed the initial contract, I got an email telling me he’d snail-mail the publishers’ rejections and that he was giving his notice that he was dropping me like a bad habit.

I was so depressed that I didn’t write another word for nearly a year. Ugh.

But a writer’s gotta’ write, so I went on and authored two more books garnering an impressive collection of agent rejections. Ugh.

But I knew Random Road was different. I loved the characters. I loved the story line. And I loved the first line of first chapter. “Last night Hieronymus Bosch met the rich and famous.”

Okay, that’s all well and good. How did I find my agent?

Confident that Random Road was ready (after untold number of edits and rewrites) I Googled: Literary agents, debut writers, mysteries. A fairly lengthy list popped up.

Now, my past efforts at writing queries were admittedly slapdash at best. Find the name of an agent, send an introductory email (a form letter I'd created that was the same for all submissions…just changing the name of the recipient), attach a synopsis and a few chapters. As I said, rejections. Or worse, no response at all.

But with Random Road, I painstakingly researched the agents and their clients. What were they looking for? What was their style? Were they REALLY looking for debut authors? What authors do they represent?

Then, when I queried, it was unique to each agent. I was meticulous in sending them what they specified in the ‘submissions’ page of their website. Some wanted sample pages, some wanted first chapters, some wanted the first fifty pages.

Four agents asked to see the complete manuscript. That had never happened before. I sent them the manuscript and then really did my research on them. What was it they were looking for in their clients? It wasn’t always just a good story (although I can’t stress how important that is), but some wanted their clients to be easy to work with. I understand, after all, if they take you on as a client, they’re taking a chance with their time and reputation.

Let me take a moment to talk about why I wanted to work with a good agent and not try to reach out to publishers on my own. Many publishers simply won’t look at unagented manuscripts. Agents act as the gatekeepers. Plus, they know the business. I don't.

They have the up-to-date contacts and the knowledge of what publishing houses are looking for.

The agent I signed with (I thank her in the acknowledgments of my published books if you’re curious about her name) gets over a hundred submissions a day. Every. Single. Day.

I attended a panel discussion she chaired at a mystery conference a few years ago and she talked about how important it is to grab a reader right from the very first sentence. Knowing I was in the audience, she asked me to stand and quote my first line. It was what had stopped her from moving on to the next submission.

I knew she was the right agent for me when she initially emailed me and told me to have a hard copy printed of Random Road and we’d talk about it over the phone. Then over the course of a few hours, we went over the book page by page, making revisions along the way.

She knew my book as well as I did. She was passionate about it.

Once we were both happy with the revisions, she began submitting the manuscript to publishing houses. As we received responses, she shared them with me. None were negative. Some were very positive. But publishing houses, just like agents, are nervous about working with a debut author.

She was always reassuring. "We'll find the right publisher for this," she said. "I have no doubt."

Then came the phone call. She’d gotten an offer from Poisoned Pen Press. Needless to say, I was elated. I have a terrific agent and a fantastic publisher. I’m also happy to say that my third mystery, Graveyard Bay, is scheduled to be released in July.

Yeah, it was worth all the effort.

Writers Gotta' Write

Hello and welcome to my first blog. I’m extremely excited and honored to be joining the Type M for Murder family.  If you have any thoughts or suggestions about what you’d like me to write, please let me know!

Since the beginning is the best place to start, let’s do that. I’m going to make an admission, it took me 20 years to get published. When Cindy, my wife, and I were dating, and I was a single dad, she said, “Okay, your life is a do-over. What is it you want to be more than anything else?”

My reply was immediate. “I want to be a novelist.”

She quickly wrote it down on a cocktail napkin (we were at a holiday reception) and handed it to me. “Never lose this. This is who you are.”

Well, I lost it. Who keeps old cocktail napkins?

But I kept the dream.

Because I was still at the newspaper in Norwalk, Connecticut and raising my daughter, I could only write part-time. But write I did. My first attempt at a novel was entitled Crossbones. It was a historical novel about pirates and the destruction of Port Royal in Jamaica by an earthquake and tidal wave. I quickly discovered that historical novels are not my genre. It was awful.


By the way, NBC aired a television series by the same name in 2014. Not their genre either.

My second attempt at a novel was a mystery/thriller set in Connecticut called Pieces of Jake. I managed to land an agent from New York and I thought I was ready for the bestseller list. However, I discovered that this agent had little patience if one of the major publishing houses in Manhattan didn’t buy the manuscript. When we didn’t get a contract, he dropped me like a bad habit.

I had a chance to review the rejection comments from the editors and they primarily talked about the lack of character development. That’s when I started work on Providence and Random Road. Initially, the book was in two first-person voices. Two protagonists, one a male, the other a female. Then I discovered that the most interesting of the two was the female and opted to write the entire novel in the voice of Geneva Chase. I still couldn’t manage to get an agent interested. But I thought the character development was miles ahead of anything else I’d written.

Moving on, I tried my hand at horror. Also, not my genre.

Then a straight-out thriller. So bad my own wife wouldn’t read it.

Back to Providence and Random Road. I had a good feeling about it, I liked the main character, Geneva Chase, and felt the story had good bones. I shortened the title to Random Road and rewrote the hell out of it. Then, rather than take the shotgun approach, I painstakingly researched agents. I started by Googling and using the criteria: literary agents, debut authors, mysteries.

About thirty agents popped up. I learned about each one, who they represented, what they were looking for, and tailor-made the query letter to each. I made certain that if they were looking for 50 sample pages, I sent 50 sample pages. If they were looking for a synopsis (which I hate doing), I sent a synopsis.

I got four requests for the entire manuscript! To make a long story short, I signed with the incredible agent, Kimberley Cameron, and I’m working on my third Geneva Chase mystery for Poisoned Pen Press. In September, I’ll be on a panel at a Mystery Conference in Scottsdale honoring Ian Rankin and then at Bouchercon, I'm on a panel entitled “In the Papers—Journalists in Fiction.”

Recently, I gave a talk to about 50 people and I told the story about how it took 20 years to finally get published.  Someone in the audience asked, “Wasn’t it hard to write all those books over all those years and not get published? Didn’t you ever feel like giving up?”

My answer was, “A writer’s gotta’ write.” And my wife, Cindy, wouldn’t let me give up.

I might not have physical possession of that cocktail napkin, but I have what was written on it tattooed on my memory. I want to be a novelist.