Blue On Black - Kenny Wayne ShepherdSo, yeah, I have an agent now.
Perhaps this is as good a time as any to recap how I got here, because it's kind of an interesting story (and I promised
Sam I'd write it down).
Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 2003. I was working as a temp in an insurance company that shall remain nameless. I was writing what I consider my first "modern" novel. I actually wrote a couple of novels - well,
novellas - back in junior high, which were horribly hackneyed pieces of cliched garbage that I'm thankful have been completely wiped out. My first "modern" novel was a
Star Wars fan fiction. Now bear in mind that at the time, I knew next to nothing about the publishing industry. I thought that I'd write the book, send it off to Del Rey books, and that would make me, yanno,
famous 'nshit.
Well, I got a reality check in the form of an email which I believe was from none other than Shelly Shapiro, who I had lunch with just two weeks ago at the
Pikes Peak Writers Conference. In the email, she explained that Del Rey didn't accept unsolicited books - especially books; they had to invite you to write one. Okay, I thought. I'm young, foolhardy, and full of fire. So I emailed her back with a challenge: what do I have to do to be invited to write a
Star Wars book? To my surprise, she replied: you have to be a known writer, with a style that would fit suitably into the
Star Wars pantheon of writers.
Fine, I thought. I'll show her.
I'd had an idea for an epic superhero novel kicking around for awhile, which sprang from my years of tabletop RPGs with superheroes as the stars. I began to build the Just Cause Universe. Writing the novel
Just Cause took me from February to October of 2004. I finished it just in time to have found out about
National Novel Writing Month. What a cool idea, I thought. I made plans to write another superhero book about a young hero joining the Hero Academy. I planned, plotted, and schemed. And Halloween night, I scrapped it all and after midnight started writing
The Milkman instead, based upon a half-remembered gaming character. I never would have thought that would lead to a charming little diversionary tale about sentient farts, but that's the magic of NaNoWriMo.
By early 2005 I was in full writing swing. I started on the sequel to
Just Cause, entitled
Rise of the Archmage. I started researching about agents and querying and synopses and stuff like that. I was going to sell my first book, and was going to be famous, and would be asked to write a
Star Wars book - at which point I'd say "oh, you know, I've got this old thing lying around here already written." Yes, I was quite naive.
By mid 2005, I was querying
Just Cause and earning rejection after rejection after rejection. It slowed my work on
The Archmage considerably. I just didn't know what I was doing wrong, but I knew it was
something. November rolled around and I wrote
Propane Jockeys, which was, to be charitable, really bad. I may turn it into a screenplay, because it'll work much better in that format than it will in written form. By the end of 2005, I had decided to self-publish (read: use a vanity press)
The Milkman. As the saying goes, I paid my money and I made my choice. I'm not really happy with it, and even now cringe when I look at it. But it is nice to sell one once in awhile (if you haven't bought one yet, I still have a
few copies left I can sign for you).
By early 2006, I was awaiting the final production of
The Milkman, and I attended the Pikes Peak Writers Conference for the first time. It truly opened my eyes. Agent Kristen Nelson taught a phenomenal class on writing query letters, and for the first time it clicked that "oh, THIS is what I've been doing wrong." I had originally planned to pitch
Just Cause to her, but due to bad planning on my part, she rejected it only days before the conference, so I wound up pitching instead to an
editor who requested pages and I never heard from again. The conference inspired me, and I decided to write a different superhero novel, and over that summer I cranked out
Deep Six in 100 days. As the leaves changed color, I shelved
Just Cause indefinitely because I knew that I didn't have the skills yet to make it into a better book. November brought
Enter The Jackrabbit out of me - my first (and to date, only) superhero novel written during NaNoWriMo. Honestly, 2006 was one of my best years ever for writing.
In early 2007, I'd spent time rewriting
Deep Six and decided to start another 100-day novel, so I began
Locke and Keyes, a space pirate novel which owed a lot of inspiration to Joss Whedon's excellent
Firefly series as well as the brilliant
Cowboy Bebop anime. Unfortunately,
Locke and Keyes fought me all the way through the first twenty days, and I finally set it aside in favor of starting yet another superhero novel -
The Greatest Generation, set in WWII. Around this time I also attended the PPWC for the second year running and pitched
Deep Six to agent Anita Kushen, who was very interested. She requested the partial, and then the full, and then I didn't hear from her. That summer I got a phone call from an agent who was "very interested" in
Deep Six after reading my pages, and wanted to know if I'd do some revisions and resubmit it. I said I would, so with help from my friend
Sherri, we tackled
Deep Six and tightened it up quite a bit. Ultimately the agent requested more and more revisions until I felt the changes he wanted would take the story in a direction I didn't want it to go, and so we parted ways. In the meantime, Sherri helped me renovate
Just Cause, which I renamed
Mustang Sally. By the end of 2007, I'd written some fifty pages of
The Milkman 2: Evil Garden Gnome, and started a new NaNoWriMo book called
Trouble, Inc.In early 2008, after being sick for nearly three months, I finished up
Trouble, Inc. (and renamed it
Troubleshooters). I'd entered
Deep Six in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and it made the Top 100 semifinalists. I'd also started yet another superhero novel about a Muslim superhero called
Light of Allah. When I went to the PPWC, I planned to pitch yet again, this time to an editor. She was interested in it, and remembered seeing it on the ABNA rolls and wanted to see pages. I also ran into Anita Kushen at the conference and asked her about my submission. It turned out she'd had a falling out with her assistant, who'd shredded everything in the office when she left - including submissions and contact information. She was very glad to run into me again and insisted on me sending her the full of
Deep Six immediately. A few months later she also asked to see
Mustang Sally. With the exception of finishing
Troubleshooters early in the year, I spent almost the entire year of 2008 revising and rewriting my existing work without creating anything new. It took NaNoWriMo for me to come up with something original:
Pariah's Moon.
Which brings us to this year.
Troubleshooters went into ABNA '09 and didn't make the first cut. I won't go into details but suffice it to say I will probably not enter ABNA again. By this time, I had three novels I considered to be in submission-ready form:
Mustang Sally, Deep Six, and
Troubleshooters. I finished
Rise of the Archmage and renamed it simply
The Archmage. Then I set about looking for something new. I thought I might branch out from superheroes because nobody seemed to want to represent that genre, so I gave a valiant effort to
Canyonlands, but fell flat and shelved it indefinitely as I had with
Locke and Keyes previously. Screw it; superheroes are what I like to write best, and what I'm best at writing, so that's what I decided to do. Mixing my love of history with superheroes has put me smack-dab into the middle of
Blackout, which I'm cranking out at a reasonably good pace. I should have a completed first draft by the end of the summer.
Then, literally days before the 2009 PPWC, Anita Kushen called me to offer representation. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Wow, I've been at this a long time. Hundreds upon hundreds of rejections and close to half a million words later, I've found someone who thinks I'm good enough to be in print.
I'm glad, because I was starting to get discouraged. Thanks for reading to the end of this!
