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.
