By Steve Thayer
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—my phone rang. It was actually a lot closer to noon and I was sitting at my desk trying to balance my curious checking account. The call was from my publicity hound at Viking Penguin in New York, a man I seldom hear from since he seldom generates any publicity about my book. He asked if I’d heard the wonderful news.
“What news?”
“Your novel Saint Mudd has been nominated for an Edgar Allen Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Best First Novel by an American Author. Congratulations.”
He wanted to know if I’d be coming to New York for the awards banquet. I told him I’d think about it. He sounded disappointed that I wasn’t jumping up and down. Well, I’m not a jump-up-and-down kind of guy. Besides, I didn’t hear any mention of a free trip to New York, Saint Mudd is not a mystery, I’m not a mystery writer, I’d never heard of the Mystery Writers of America, and I’d never heard of the Edgar Allen Poe Awards. (I guess they call them the “Edgars.” Cute, huh?) I hung up the phone and muttered to myself, “Big F-word-ing deal!”
Big Mistake!
As I discovered all too late, the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe hovers over nominees as they are given the news of this illustrious honor, and the world’s first great mystery writer didn’t take kindly to my obscene slight of his awards. It was thus that I became the victim in a cruel and unfair plot that only Poe’s ghost, with the help of the Mystery Writers of America, could concoct. The specter began on me almost immediately.
My phone rang again. It was my editor at Viking Penguin. He offered his congratulations. “We’ll be flying you to New York for the awards banquet.”
Ah hah! There was my free trip.
No sooner had I hung up than the phone rang again. It was the editor from Signet who was readying Saint Mudd for paperback. “Look forward to meeting you. We’ll be scheduling autograph sessions at a couple of bookstores in Manhattan for the day after the awards.”
At long last, I thought, fame in the Big Bad Apple.
My phone had not rung so much since the last time I maxed out my credit cards, and with each ring of those bells, bells, bells, my spirits soared. The businessman I call my small press editor phoned from Washington, D.C. You see, Poe’s ghost knew what the Mystery Writers of America apparently did not know. Only two years earlier, this businessman and I had pooled all our money and together self-published a paperback edition of Saint Mudd that became a number-one bestseller in the Twin Cities—all this before Viking Penguin and Signet purchased the rights so that they could put out their own editions. Anyway, my small press editor was proud and happy. He promised he would fly up to
New York for the banquet. “You’re a sure winner!”
“There are four other people nominated,” I reminded him.
“It’s in the bag. Write your acceptance speech.”
Later that week, I received the official nomination in the mail. It was very impressive. The letterhead read, Mystery Writers of America, Inc. Eyeing me at the top of the page was the gloomy visage of Edgar Allen Poe. Included was an invitation to the banquet, a little bit of history on the awards, and a list of members. Although it was an impressive list, including Raymond Chandler and Ellery Queen, it appeared that most of their members were dead. Perhaps this really was an award from the grave.
After a writer is nominated for a major award, mysterious forces go to work, forces over which the writer has no control. The nomination gets fed like a bowl of Alpo to publicity hounds whose job it is to bark out the news to anybody who will listen. My publicity hound is a direct descendant of the Hound of the Baskervilles and should have been shot years ago. Not content with just sending a press release to every news organization in North America, he also wrote a so-called thank you letter to the Mystery Writers of America congratulating them on their excellent judgment. He enclosed glowing reviews and articles about my work from the Chicago Tribune and the Milwaukee Journal detailing the tremendous job of self-publishing I had done, and how many books I had sold. I thought the letter and clippings smacked of campaigning and were a subtle attempt to turn a writing award into a publishing award. But as I said, after the nomination, the writer gets pushed aside and the pros take over.
I was elated about one piece that resulted from this publicity release. A small article about the nomination appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, and lo and behold, the article was signed at the bottom by no less than Mary Ann Grossman, the paper’s esteemed book page editor—the same Saint Paul editor who had for four years managed to avoid writing one single word about a Saint Paul writer who had written a historical novel about Saint Paul, Minnesota. My sister called with her congratulations.
“On the award?”
“No. On forcing Mary Ann Grossman to write about you.”
So for two weeks the congratulatory messages trickled in. I found cute notes slipped under my door. I found warm messages on my answering machine. The news got tacked to the bulletin board at WCCO TV, where I used to write up the shootings, the stabbings, and the two-alarm fires.
Like a lot of writers, I didn’t believe in awards, but now I found myself jumping up and down at the prospect of winning.
Then came the letter. Yes, the infamous letter.
Again it was from the Mystery Writers of America. I sat on my couch and sliced it open carefully with a sharp knife. I unfolded it. There was Edgar Allen Poe staring me in the face. There was that list of dead mystery writers. And there in black and white was the cruel plot twist. The letter read as follows:
Dear Mr. Thayer:
It is our unhappy task to notify you that Saint Mudd has been disqualified for consideration for an Edgar Allen Poe Award. We did not realize that the book had been published in 1990 by Pilot Grove Press. The guidelines clearly state that the work must be published in the calendar year 1992 for the 1993 “Edgars.”
I thought I heard a big, ugly bird laughing over my shoulder. Quickly I turned toward the door. T’was the wind and nothing more.
“You can’t disqualify me,” I screamed. “There is no Pilot Grove Press. We just made up that stupid name so the book wouldn’t look self-published. It’s my first novel! I’ve got a free trip to New York! I’ve got an article written by Mary Ann Grossman! Are you people on drugs?”
Surely this was some cruel hoax, the kind of action one would expect from a lawyer’s group, not a writers group. I’d nothing wrong. The book’s publishing history was on the copyright page of the Viking Penguin edition. What kind of book reader is it who doesn’t read the fine print on the copyright page?
Now more than ever I wanted that prestigious award that I’d never heard of before. I wanted my trip to the Big Apple. I wanted to sign autographs at Manhattan bookstores. Saint Mudd had been nominated on its merits and disqualified an on a technicality. I wanted justice. I wanted my F-word-ing Edgar!
The Baskerville hound called. “Relax,” he told me. “We’re appealing. I wrote them another letter. There’s a good chance they’ll reverse their decision.”
In other words, the hound who had told them what a tremendous job of self-publishing I had done in 1990 was now going to turn around and try to convince them I’d done a rather lousy job of self-publishing, so it didn’t really count. Only a professional PR flak could so shamelessly tackle the task.
I waited a week while the arguments raged in New York. I couldn’t sleep at night. I kept hearing a tell-tale heart beating beneath my floorboards—thump, thump thump, thump thump…
I pretended not to see the large, black bird sitting in the tree outside my window. I avoided all questions about the nomination. I was beginning to think I had been nominated for the award from hell. But of course anybody who has read the works of Poe knows he penned no happy endings.
Dear Mr. Thayer:
We see no way to allow the nomination of Saint Mudd and at the same time maintain the integrity of the awards. Do come to New York for the banquet and don’t feel as if you’re in hostile territory.
Yeah, right! Do I get a special nametag that says Disqualified? Where do the disqualifieds sit?
So in the end, the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe had a hearty laugh at my expense, while the Mystery Writers of America were able to maintain the integrity of their Edgars. The whole sorry story reminded me of a Jerry Seinfeld line: “I’ve been outed, and I wasn’t even in.”
My second novel, The Weatherman, is scheduled to be in bookstores in the summer of 1994. No, it’s not a mystery either, and I’m still not a mystery writer. I only pray the new book doesn’t fall into the hands of this mysterious writers group to be considered for one of their mysterious awards. I don’t think I could handle another Poe nomination—thump thump, thump thump, thump thump… (This article first appeared in A View From the Loft in February of 1994.) Back to top.
By Steve Thayer
No writer knows more than I do about what it’s like to sit out there unpublished. No writer wanted it more than I did, and no writer felt more cheated, more bitter, when for five years nobody in the publishing business would read my book, much less publish it. I have gone from having a self-published hardcover to a small-press paperback to a three-book contract, both hardcover and paperback, with one of the largest publishers in the world—Viking/Signet. Everything I write here is based on my experience. Having said that, don’t take everything published authors say as gospel. There is no right way or wrong way to write a book. Writers are the most independent, individual people on earth. That is why we write. Find what works for you. This is what worked for me. Ten Rules for Writing the Great American Novel.
Rule Number One: Do not sit down to write a book. Sit down to write a sentence. Build that sentence into a paragraph. Then build that paragraph into a page. If you sit down to write a book, you will be defeated before you have begun. It’s too much to think about. When I sit down to write, I have my notes in front of me and a computer screen, about half a page in length. That’s all I’m working on, that half page—a character’s face, an incident in a park, a love scene. I think the biggest mistake new writers make is their approach: “Page One. Chapter One. Once upon a time…”
Forget it. Your dead.
If I have an idea for a book, I see scenes in my head. I write those scenes first, very detailed scenes. Some writers do all of their research first, then write an outline, and then write their book. What a waste of time. Why write an outline when you could be writing the book? I do my research as I write, since all of it is going to be rewritten anyway. As a result, I’ve never had writer’s block because if the writing is not coming, I have something else that has to be done—some research, a location to visit, an interview to do, a book or an article that has to be read.
I’m often asked how many pages I write per day. Who cares? Pages per day is quantity over quality. I have the talent and experience to crank out twenty pages per day. What does it matter if it’s all crap? You should be thinking in hours per day. As a rule, I don’t sit down to my computer to write unless I can spend at least two hours there. For years my routine was this: Watch the ten o’clock news, watch “Cheers,” then go write. I would start writing at eleven at night and write until three or four in the morning. In my mind, the reader is always climbing into bed and opening my book. People read them at night; I write them at night.
I write the ending first. Everything has to lead toward that end. I then have plenty of time to rewrite the ending and make it even better, or change it completely. Every time I hear some writer say, “I haven’t decided how to end my book yet,” I want to shoot the bastard. What is the point of your story if you don’t know how it ends? After the ending scenes, I write the first chapter scenes. Which brings us to…
Rule Number Two: Your first chapter has to be excellent. Whenever I’m stuck, whenever I haven’t got anything else to write, I go back and work on the first chapter. Chapter One is the chapter that is going to get you published. It is the chapter on which critics are going to focus. And it is the chapter that is going to get readers to buy your book. If you are an unpublished writer, New York editors are only going to give you three pages to convince them that you are a professional writer and that you have a story to tell. My editor will give you less than two. At first I thought this was grossly unfair, but having rummaged through the slush pile at Viking, and after having had unpublished manuscripts handed to me, I can tell you that three pages is more than fair. Only if those three pages are good do editors keep reading.
What is an editor looking for? My editor wants to know if you are a book reader, and that takes him less than two pages. If you don’t read books, don’t try to write a book.
Rule Number Three: Do not get depressed and throw away your writing; get depressed and put away your writing. Fine writing is like fine wine—if you put it on a shelf and just let it sit there, it gets better. I don’t know how this works, but it works. Take it off the shelf a couple of weeks later and it’s not that bad. You now have something to work with. You can walk away from your writing without walking away from your commitment to writing. Don’t force it. If it’s not there, take a break.
Rule Number Four: Rewriting is the dirty little secret of good writers. I rewrite to death. Just because you have four hundred manuscript pages does not mean that you have a book. In most cases, what you have is a first draft. You’ve done all that work, why stop now? I’ve heard writers say, “I just write it once, then send it off.” Yeah, and their books read that way, too. That’s more ego than talent. If you have the time and the talent to make your writing better, then make it better.
Rule Number Five: Character rules. Taped to my computer, right in front of my face, is this from a review of a Pete Dexter novel: “He has a powerful understanding that character rules, that we live with our weaknesses and die of our strengths.”
A lot of people say, “I have a great idea for a story.” Fine, but do they have a great idea for a character? Story ideas are a dime a dozen. Character rules.
Years ago, I was reading a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald when I came across a paragraph about a writer friend of his who joined the Marine Corps when he was eighteen, went off to World War I and got gassed. Fitzgerald helped him get published. This writer, Thomas Boyd, died at the age of thirty-seven, when the mustard gas finally ate through his lungs. I fictionalized this tragic hero and made him the lead character in my novel Saint Mudd.
In my acting days, I parked cars at the Hilton Hotel in Pasadena. Every hour of every day people would come to the hotel to catch the bus to the airport and I would help them with their bags. One day a burn victim showed up. I was shocked. The man had no face. He had two slits for his eyes, two holes for a nose, and a gap for a mouth. He caught the bus at the hotel about once a month. As the months went by I became less and less shocked by his appearance and I took to watching the reaction of the people around him, most of whom were seeing him for the first time. There was always a long line for the bus, and then at the end of the line was a space where the burn victim stood off by himself. One day I couldn’t take it no anymore so I walked over to him and said hello. I talked to him every month after that. I don’t remember the conversations—they were warm but trivial—but I never forgot the man. As writers, we never stop asking, “What if?” What if he lost his face in Vietnam? What if he wore a mask, as s ome burn victims do? What if because he literally couldn’t deal with people face to face, he learned to deal with books, and newspapers, and documents—he learned to be a pleasant voice on the other end of the phone line—all of the skills necessary to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist? With a little imagination that burn victim at the bus stop became the lead character in my novel The Weatherman.
The legal people at Viking insist on putting a disclaimer in their novels, including mine, that all characters are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental. Of course it’s bullshit. Every fictional character should have a starting point, but that’s all it should be—a starting point. Create good characters and the reader will follow them anywhere. Character rules.
Rule Number Six: Get your facts straight. Avoid stupid mistakes. Nothing turns readers off faster. Go to the location. Take notes. Study a map. Draw your own maps. Talk to people. Read books and articles. Analyze photographs. When I researched television news, I did the best research a writer can do—I rolled up my sleeves and I did the work. I took a job in the newsroom at WCCO TV. Forget that fly-on-the-wall bit. I’ll give you three examples from The Weatherman.
What side of a helicopter does the pilot sit on? Having never been in a helicopter, I would have guessed the left side, same as a car. That would have been stupid mistake number one. The pilot sits one the right, the passenger on the left, as I learned when I went up in the WCCO helicopter.
What color uniforms do the prisoners at Stillwater prison wear? I would have guessed blue. That would have been stupid mistake number two, as I learned when I toured the prison. The prisoners at Stillwater can wear their own clothes at all times as long as they are not gang related—something I thought my readers would find more interesting than drab blue uniforms.
While I was touring the prison the warden pulled me aside and said, “Steve, you’re not going to have that stupid scene where the prisoners take their metal cups and run them across the bars, are you?” There went stupid mistake number three. Prisoners drink from Styrofoam cups. Metal cups can be made into weapons. (I did get this idea about the prisoners taking their Styrofoam cups and running them across the bars, bits of Styrofoam flying all over the cell block, but that’s another story.)
Rule Number Seven: Get personal. Good writing is like good acting—it comes from inside. Don’t be afraid to put your heart and your guts into your writing. The more personal your writing, the more I want to read it. Did you ever get your hands on somebody else’s diary? Fascinating, wasn’t it? Why? Because it was so damn personal, so private, and because you weren’t suppose to be reading it! A good novel should read like a diary you’re not suppose to be reading. It’s the reason I don’t like author readings. Novels are very intimate things. People crawl into bed with them. They’re not meant to be read aloud.
Rule Number Eight: Invest in yourself. If you’re not willing to invest in your career, why should others? When I was a parking ramp manager I bought a desk, a computer, a letter-quality printer, reference books, and in the end I published my own novel. Poverty stories wear thin fast.
Rule Number Nine: Do not write an original screenplay—you’ll be cutting yourself off at the knees. As long as you’re dreaming big, write a novel, sell the option to the movies, sell the rights to the movies and then maybe write the screenplay. Get paid three and four times instead of once. The average movie today costs $20 million to make. Is your writing worth that much? Most original screenplays are written by people inside the movie business. In fact, most published writers don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of selling to the movies, but at least we can get them to consider our work. If you are unpublished, your original screenplay will not be considered.
Rule Number Ten: Analyze and imitate. Raymond Chandler said that, not me. I’m just imitating him. Go back and study your favorite books. What was it about those books that you liked? In what style were they written? First person? Third person? How did the author begin the story? How were the chapters divided? I title all of my chapters, something I ripped off from Joseph Wambaugh. I divide my books into books—Book One, Book Two, Book Three—a rip-off of Leon Uris, James Clavell and Colleen McCullough. I like short sentences—Ernest Hemingway. Tragic love stories—F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tough guys, booze, blondes and drugs—Raymond Chandler. I only rip off the best. Finally, they say half of writing is reading. I think it’s a lot more than half. Read read, read. If you read good books, you’ll write a good book. (This article first appeared in The View From the Loft in May of 1995.) Back to top.
By Steve Thayer
My efforts to get a book published began with the completion of my first novel, Saint Mudd, in 1986. Over the next two years I collected nearly forty rejection slips from New York publishers, small presses, literary agents and university presses. The following letter was typical.
October 20, 1986
Dear Mr. Thayer:
Thank you for your submission of Saint Mudd…
Unfortunately, we feel that as a crime/historical novel its audience would be far too limited, and therefore a difficult “sell” to a major publisher… We would encourage you to try us again with a novel of greater scope and breadth, not so geographically confined…
Yours sincerely,
Jonathan Lazear
Nine years later I’m still the same geographically confined author, and I’m still writing novels of limited scope and breadth. In other words, I write novels about Minnesota. Today my editor is Al Silverman, the managing editor at Viking Penguin. Silverman, who for fifteen years was president of the Book-of-the-Month Club, personally edits my manuscripts. And my novel Saint Mudd? It’s now in its fifth printing.
The people I’ve worked with are some of the best in the business. How I came to be working with them and some of the things I’ve learned from them is what I’d like to write about. Ten rules for getting your novel published.
The most obvious rule, which a lot of writers overlook, is to write a good book. I’ll skip that and start with Rule Number One and a half: Find another career. No, I’m not being cute. Writing should always be a second income. That’s the beauty of writing. No credentials are required. You can be a lawyer and write. You can be a doctor and write. You can be a housewife and mother and write. It would be sad if we left writing to the journalists and the academics.
Whatever you choose to do, don’t do what I did. I developed tunnel vision. I wanted to be a novelist so bad that I couldn’t see the other opportunities circling around me. At thirty-six, I was still managing parking ramps. I was finally working in news when I signed my book contract with Viking. The contract allowed me to quit my job, sit home for two years and write full time—every writer’s dream, right? They were the most boring two years of my life. Now I’m looking for something else to do—news, teaching, or acting, anything to get me out of the house and away from my desk. I’ll always be a writer, but the everyday life of a writer bores me. Find another career or job that you can live with.
Rule Number Two: Know the market. That doesn’t mean write for the market. I don’t believe in that. But I do believe you have to know who is publishing the kind of books you want to write. Go to the bookstores. Spend time there. Take down the names and addresses of publishers. You’ll soon see a pattern developing. Viking leans toward popular fiction; W.W. Norton, literary works; Random House, nonfiction, etc.
Rule Number Three: Never submit a complete manuscript unless someone has asked for it. It’s a waste of your time and money and the editor’s time. If you are unpublished, the publisher will want to see a complete manuscript before buying, but not right away. To start, submit sample chapters, usually the first fifty pages. No fancy covers—first sign of an amateur. No copyright information or warnings about stealing your writing—that’s the second sign of an amateur. A simple title page with your name, address and phone number. The editor turns the title page and the story begins. Your manuscript should be clean and neat. Double-spaced. Page numbers go at the top. The spelling should be correct, the punctuation as close as you can get it. Some writers think they don’t have to worry about spelling and punctuation because the manuscript is going to be copyedited anyway. Yes, it is, but if you submit a sloppy manuscript you’re never going to get that far.
In my experience this is the way publishing works: If you submit your work like am amateur, you are going to be treated like an amateur. If you submit your work like a professional, you’re only going to be treated like an amateur half of the time.
Rule Number Four: Collect the names of editors. Again, go to the bookstores. Find the kind of books that you’re writing. Look in those books under acknowledgments. Most writers thank their editors. Publishers Weekly often lists editors, as do other magazines for writers.
Rule Number Five: Put an editor’s name on the manuscript when you mail it. This is very important. When I walked into the offices at Viking for the first time and Al Silverman came out to greet me, the first thing I said to him was, “On behalf of struggling writers everywhere, show me the slush pile. Show me what happens to a manuscript once it enters the building.” He took me down the hall to a small cubicle with three desks. Next to those desks were stacked nine large, white, rectangular buckets, overflowing with manuscripts. At one of the desks sat a college kid with yet another bucket—he might have been twenty-one—opening this mail, looking for return postage, stuffing all of that writing, all of those dreams, back into the envelopes along with a form letter, and sending it back where it came from. Unread.
I asked Silverman how writers avoid ending up in this pile. He said, “Simple. Put an editor’s name on it. All our editors open their own mail.” Don’t ever mail a submission without putting a specific editor’s name on it—and make a phone call to be sure that editor is still at that publishing house. This will not prevent you from getting back a form rejection slip, or a letter saying they do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. That is probably what you will get. Those are the odds. But at least your work will have been opened and looked at by an editor. You want to keep your work out of the slush pile because ninety-nine percent of the stuff in that pile is crap. I’ve read it. Your challenge as an unpublished writer is to put your writing into the hands of the people who make the decisions. That’s not easy, but one of the best things you can do is to put their names on your envelopes.
Rule Number Six—and this is the one a lot of writers don’t like to hear: If you are an unpublished writer do not waste your time looking for an agent. Agents write nothing. Agents publish nothing. Agents take. They take fifteen percent of a writer’s income; fifteen percent of nothing is nothing, and if you are unpublished, that’s what you are to an agent. Nothing! Every time you send your manuscript to an agent, you could have been sending it to a publisher. While I was trying to get published, every positive response I got, I got from sending my work directly to an editor. Once you’re published, you won’t have any trouble getting an agent. They’ll crawl out of the woodwork. Which bring us to…
Rule Number Seven: Never negotiate your own contract. Get an agent or a literary lawyer to do that—and not just any lawyer, but one who has negotiated book contracts. My contract was eighteen pages long and the only two pages I understood were the two pages where I got paid. No, this does not contradict rule number six. What I’m saying is this: You need a lawyer or an agent to negotiate your contract, but you do not need a lawyer or an agent to get offered that contract.
Rule Number Eight: Keep your cover letter short and simple. Never more than one page. Remember, a publisher’s mail literally comes in buckets. A good cover letter is not going to get you published, but a bad cover letter will keep you from getting read. Why read your bad manuscript when they’ve already read your bad letter? I sent no cover letters, just the book. When I agreed to sign with Viking they didn’t know the first thing about me. I could have been locked up in a penitentiary for all they cared. They wanted the books.
Rule Number Nine: Get to work on something else. When my small press edition of Saint Mudd was being considered at Random House, Doubleday, and eventually at Viking, they all asked the same thing: “Does he have something else that we can read?” If you have finished your book get to work on something else, because they do ask. And when a New York editor asks,” Do you have something else that we can read?” what are you going to say? No? I almost had to.
I do not write in a linear style, beginning to end. I had written some scattered scenes for The Weatherman, but very few of them. When my small press editor, Al Eisele, who was pushing the book to New York, said they wanted something else to read, I told him to stall them for three weeks—I could probably string together the first 100 pages. Then, as I remember it, Random House wanted Saint Mudd but didn’t want The Weatherman. Doubleday wanted The Weatherman but not Saint Mudd. Viking wanted both books. It was a writer’s dream. They flew me to New York and put me up at the famous Algonquin Hotel. When I met Al Silverman the next day, he told me it was those 100 pages that sealed the deal.
Your advance from a New York publisher will probably be somewhere between $10 thousand and $50 thousand. Your advance payments will be divided into three or four parts. My advance for The Weatherman was paid part upon signing, part upon completion of half the manuscript, part upon completion of the manuscript and part upon publication. At every step the manuscript has to be acceptable to the publisher. Don’t send in 200 pages of shit and expect to get paid. I tried it. It didn’t work. And finally…
Rule Number Ten: Put your work out there. If you truly believe its ready, put your writing out there and hope somebody discovers it. I’ll tell you how this worked for me. At the same time that Random House and Doubleday were considering Saint Mudd, two men I had never met were having lunch on Martha’s Vineyard—Al Silverman and PBS historian David McCullough. Silverman had retired from the Book-of-the-Month Club. He came out of retirement to take over Viking. One of his jobs was to find new writers, particularly writers who might do well in paperback. He was explaining this to David McCullough when McCullough said, “You aught to talk to Al Eisele about this gangster novel he’s got his hands on.” Two weeks after Silverman returned to New York, I was offered a contract. Was this luck? Fate? I don’t know, but I do know it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t put my work out there.
The people I’ve mentioned have several things in common. They’re unpretentious people. They love books. They like writers. And they talk to one another. They are always looking for new writers. After I signed my contract, I would have loved to shove one of my forty rejection slips into their faces, but I had never approached any of them. They found me. If one of the largest publishers in the world can find a parking ramp manger in St. Paul, then they can find you too. (This article first appeared in The View From the Loft in June of 1995.) Back to top.