WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 05, 2007
I get enough questions about the books I wrote before I sold to humiliate myself here, on this very blog. As I’ve learned in this business – very few people sell their first or second books. I sold my fourth complete manuscript – which my agent says is totally average. That’s right. I’m totally average. I can handle it. Just as long as my first three manuscripts never, ever, see publication.
Because it might help someone – I will tell you about my first, embarrassing attempts at publication.
Number one – Blackheart. Yes. I tried to write a serious, historical pirate book. Mostly this was because I love historical fiction and have a serious thing for pirates. So, thinking it would be really easy, I tried to pull it off. I made many, many mistakes with Blackheart. First of all, I decided to put the book in Georgian England – a time when piracy was pretty much over. Then, I made my hero a swarthy, bald Frenchman. This is due to a fixation with Yul Brynner and a guy who was in my philosophy of art class in grad school. There was this guy (bald) who had a soft, foreign accent. My friends and I imagined him to be an agent in the Mossad, a displaced Italian Count, something like that. At the end of the year, we were very disappointed to discover his name was Nelson and he was the Venezuelan boy toy of one of the professors. That – and we saw his knees for the first time. He had chicken knees – I’m totally serious – and I don’t even know what that means.
Another big mistake I made, was that the first half of the book is virtually all description – and the second half is all dialog. And then there was the question of plot…
I thought I would turn that into the first in a trilogy with the second book taking place in Africa. The hero was a missionary – you heard me right – who was fighting the slave trade. The heroine was the daughter of the slave trader. Uh huh. A Georgian book set in Africa. Riiiiiiiiiiggghhhht. It was going to be Darkheart.
Anyway – after several rejections (for which I am eternally grateful now) I decided to try something else. Silhouette had launched a line of adventure books called Bombshell. They claimed they wanted to put ordinary women in extraordinary situations. So I went with a girl scout leader hiking with two teen scouts in the mountains of Idaho where they have a deadly run-in with white supremacists who are planning to gas the NAACP conference in Boise. Needless to say – it was better than book 1, but still pretty awful. And it turned out that the most successful books in the line were not about ordinary women – but about FBI and CIA agents, etc. More rejections followed suit. The name of this train wreck was My Own Deadly Idaho.
My third book was when I first experimented with comedy. The Adulterer’s Unofficial Guide to Disney World (I still think it’s a great title) came closer to my true voice. Unfortunately, I’d made several mistakes – the biggest one was that both my hero and heroine were married and having a blistering affair at Disney World. You can just smell the rejections.
Even though no one will ever see these books, they were very important to my learning curve. I learned that I can’t write something just because I like to read it. I also learned how to write what I wanted to see, instead of what I THOUGHT other people wanted to see.
So there you have it – the sordid truth behind my success. What’s in YOUR closet?