Getting Involved in RMFW Led to Getting Published

(Following is the the text of the talk I was going to give at Colorado Gold last Friday night had I not been sick with COVID. Thanks to all the members of RMFW for the tremendous support and for Writer of the Year title again. It means so much.)

I would not be here without Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

RMFW has given me much more than I have given to the organization.

And I will prove it.

You could title this section “Forty Years In Five Minutes.”  Here we go.

I started writing fiction in 1983.  My first novel – a mystery – took six years to write. I got a good agent in New York—an agency that still exists to this day. The agency was so good I quit a good national news job with Public Broadcasting and I tended bar for a year. I didn’t want my second novel to take as long to write.

My first novel didn’t sell. But I wrote novel number two in about three years, returning to work as a newspaper reporter after the bartending gig depleted my savings. No sale on novel number one, but I got a good agent for novel number two. This was 1992. In fact, the same agency that represented John Grisham offered to sell it. But, after two years of work, no sale.

Novel number three took about six years to write. More crime fiction. This mystery I liked better than the first two. A good agency offered representation—one that exists to this day. It was 1999.

After a year of work with the agency, working on improving the manuscript with my agent’s feedback, so many long detailed conversations that I felt like I had a good friend in New York City, I got a form rejection in the mail from the agency. “I’m sorry your submission is not right for us at this time.” Yes, one of those. My follow-up letters and WTF calls and emails went unanswered.

Novel number four took four years to write. This time, a few offers for representation but they all looked small and weird to me so I didn’t sign up with anyone. It was 2005.

I sincerely thought I would never be published.  One part of me was thinking, “you had a lot of fun writing those books and you did attract three good New York agents, so you gotta keep going.”  The other part of me was thinking, “it’s a tough business and maybe you’re not cut out for it. Maybe you’re not a writer.”

In 2006, a writer friend introduced me to a small start-up publisher based in Boulder. The publisher had plans. He claimed. He read novel #3 and novel #4.  He said he liked number three better, featuring a female hunting guide named Allison Coil. 

In 2007, he printed 2,000 hardbacks of my first novel, Antler Dust.  I was ecstatic. I drove all over the state to bookstores and libraries and did anything I could to promote it. I was published. Readers liked Allison. I got actual feedback. In fact, I sold all 2,000 books. But the publisher decided he wasn’t in it for the long haul and pulled the plug.

In 2010, another friend introduced me a medium-sized publisher in Aspen that focused on Colorado writers and Colorado topics. The publishing house worked with about 40 writers. It skewed a bit non-fiction but did publish fiction. The editor there offered to publish the second novel, Buried by the Roan. She also offered to put out novel number one as a trade paperback. Suddenly, I had a series. 

Buried by the Roan did fairly well, by my standards. Again, I hustled all over the state to try and find readers. But the publisher struggled and, let me know if you’ve heard this before, went out of business.

I had written novel number three in the series because, well, that’s what you do if you have a series. And my new RMFW friend and former Writer of the Year Linda Joffe Hull left a draft of it on her kitchen counter during Colorado Gold in 2012. She left it on her kitchen counter because she was hosting an editor from Midnight Ink, a crime fiction house based in Minnesota. The editor was Terri Bischoff, whom many of you know. She picked it up, read it, and I got an email from Linda the next day. Terri was digging the book. But later Terri told me it would be a year until she could make me an offer based on cash flow and other commitments. One night in a bar in LoDo – in fact, after a Linda Joffe Hull book launch – Terri made me an offer.

Trapline came out in 2014. It won the Colorado Book Award for Best Mystery the following year. Lake of Fire followed in 2015 and was a finalist for the same award. I was officially with a crime fiction publisher.  The reviews were good.

At a national mystery writers conference in Raleigh, Terri told me over a beer that she couldn’t offer me another contract. The reviews were good, yes, but the sales were disappointing.

By that time I’d written the fifth book, The Melancholy Howl, and went ahead and self-published it in 2018. I also got all the rights back to all four books in the series and went about putting the whole series out under one over-all look and feel.

But, what would I do now? No publisher – and certainly nowhere to go. No publisher is going to pick you up five books into a series.

The next chapter of the story, as they say, is a fluke. A pure, bonafide, 100 percent freakish bit of serendipity. I’ll get to that in a second.

But what changed?

On the one hand, there were twenty years of writing without getting published—in fact, twenty-three years.

And then in the next decade when I worked with three different publishers—what changed?

I started hanging around RMFW.  It was around 2005 or so when I went to a day-long workshop in downtown Denver and started making friends, including many who are in this room this evening. 

I started sharing my work. I started reading the work of my friends. I started helping with refreshments at the monthly meetings, then helped choose the meeting topics, locations, and all of that.

I served on the RMFW board and, later, became president. I was grew increasingly active in Mystery Writers of America and the regional Rocky Mountain chapter.

There was a direct, undeniable, solid connection between my increased activity with RMFW and my success.  I wish to hell I knew whether a friend dragged me along or if I spotted a flyer that got me to that first day-long workshop, but suddenly I had my crowd—and it was scary as hell.

I thought I had already tasted the big time—three New York agents and all of that—even if I never managed to connect on a swing.

But what was I going to do in those black-hole months after being dropped by Midnight Ink?

It was at a party for Colorado Gold volunteers at Betsy Dornbusch’s house on the eve of another conference when I met Danielle Burby. She was an agent for a small but good New York literary agency. By now I had rewritten novel number four—the one that had only attracted a few small, weird agent offers. I liked its new tone and its new flow. Danielle offered to read it—and ultimately offered representation. Maybe I would have a new path forward. I was ecstatic. By the way, the Danielle Burby connection was again thanks to Linda Hull. 

Danielle and I worked together for about six or eight months. She wanted some changes in novel number four.  She had great ideas.  And then she announced she was switching from crime fiction to young adult and she would have to let me go—before we really got started.

She said she would recommend that her boss, agent Josh Getzler, take a look at my work but she made a big point of telling me that he was under no obligation to pick me up.

Drum roll … he liked the book.

So, I thought, novel number four might see the light of day—some 15 years after writing it. This was late in the fall of 2017. How do I remember the date so well? Because of that fluke thing I mentioned earlier. 

Here it is.

In the mid-1990’s I was a reporter for The Denver Post. I covered Denver Public Schools. For long board meetings, particularly when the board would go into closed-door meetings, I brought a book along to read into the late hours, waiting for the board members to emerge with their decisions and announcements, etc.

The district had hired a new superintendent, a guy named Irv Moskowitz. One evening Irv spotted the book I had handy to read – of course, a mystery – and he said he loved it.  We struck up a friendship over books. Soon, he offered to hire me as director of communications for the district, to end twenty years of reporting and come work for him. I made the switch.

Irv and I became good friends. We bonded over books, politics, and baseball. The guy taught me how to think in many, many ways.  He was down to earth, unpretentious, endlessly cynical, and great at spotting phonies and posers. We had approximately 1,000 lunches sitting in a park eating burritos or pizza and figuring out the world.

One day in the summer of 2018, Irv mentioned an idea for a novel about baseball. It was a funny moment because I don’t think he liked my books. He never said much about them, which told me all I needed to know. He told me I should write his baseball novel. It was, in fact, a really good premise.

That night, mulling it over, the second half of the story percolated up in my writer brain. It came fully formed. When I ran it by Irv the next day, he loved it.

I called my agent and talked to him. My agent Josh, it turned out, had previously worked as chief operating officer for a minor league team in the New York Yankees’ organization. Josh knew baseball. He loved the idea, too.  “But it can’t be only about baseball,” he cautioned. He liked the idea so much, however, that he suggested putting novel number four on hold. We would wait for the baseball novel.

I started writing. I started sending the chapters to Irv. As a lifelong reader (but never a writer of fiction) Irv offered keen insights. Again, lunches in parks. Occasionally he would show up scowling and disappointed. Irv’s guidance was invaluable. I finished the novel that would become The Fireballer in December of 2019.  How do I remember the date so well? Because it went out on submission two months later in February of 2020, right as the pandemic was changing everything about our daily lives and the publishing business, too.

With Josh’s guidance and patience, we finally sold it in the late fall of 2021—18 months after first going out on submission. The book was published in January of this year, six weeks after my good friend Irv died—suddenly. He was 87. He was at the gym working out on a Friday and fell ill, gone the following Tuesday.  He had read every word, of course, many times. But he never held the final book in his hands or knew that it was dedicated to him. The reader reaction has been terrific, by far the widest audience I’ve had to date.

So let’s go back to that fluke—that conversation over a book that changed my life. Carrying a book around is certainly no big deal, but I wouldn’t have developed a friendship with Irv and I would not have had that great idea for a story drop out of the sky had I not brought a book with me that night. I was so very lucky.

Declaring yourself a reader? No big deal. Declaring yourself a writer? Maybe, for some, that’s a bigger step.

But guess what—all of you here tonight have done that. Of course. You are here among friends. And likely this weekend you will attend workshops and take notes during panels. You might encounter an idea or two that will unlock your approach to writing—open up a whole new way of thinking about your craft.

There is no shortage of skills being taught this weekend here at Colorado Gold. Word by word, sentence by sentence, character by character and plot by plot your skills can be improved and refined. The point of all those skills is to help you tell YOUR story in the most effective way possible, no matter if it’s dystopian horror or a non-spicy YA romcom.

But what about the drive? The determination? The persistence?

I’m talking only about the drive, determination and persistence to reach YOUR goals, whatever those goals may be. I don’t see any classes or workshops on that score, perhaps, because it’s different for each and every one of us. Nobody else but you knows how high a priority writing is in your life. And nobody else but you likely knows all the other factors you are dealing with on a daily basis—real-life situations that make it hard to find the time to write.

Writing is a luxury. For some of us, it’s also a flat-out necessity and survival mechanism to help us endure and understand this crazy world and better understand the human condition.

So it’s up to each of you to find the motivation to apply everything you have learned and everything you will learn.

I’m still learning. I am so glad a couple of those early novels didn’t get published. The one that John Grisham’s agent represented for about two years? I am so glad it did not get published. The idea wasn’t bad. The execution would stink up this whole room. I would have been ripped to shreds and probably would have stopped writing.

I am still learning today. I will be taking notes this weekend, too.

So the skills are all there—and you may in fact hear contradictory advice when it comes to those skills. It’s up to you to sort through them, pick and choose the skills that best suits the voice you want to use for your personal expression.

But the motivation is all on you.

Or …

Is it?

Having applied the pressure on each of you, let me offer an alternate take.

I was leading you on—the unreliable narrator.

All that intrinsic drive is fine. If you’ve got it, swell. But the real key is your writing pals. Your critique groups, your beta readers, your friends you meet over coffee over Zoom to swap ideas and chat about some struggle in your work in progress.

You encourage others, others encourage you. You write for yourself, you start writing for them, your circle gets bigger and soon you find a champion and it’s just a given that you’re going to write today or at least this week and pump new life into your story.

Yes, the skills of writing are all here this weekend. Just as you can get better at playing guitar or long-distance running or hitting a baseball going 105 MPH, the techniques can be learned. 

But the drive might come from a chance meeting in the buffet line this weekend or sitting down next to someone in the audience at a panel. A casual acquaintance might turn into a true writer pal who picks you up and tells you to send out another dozen query letters or who insists you come to workshop. “Hi, how are you. What do you write?” This weekend, that question is a guaranteed conversation-starter. Chances are your batting average for finding new friends and connections here will be better than any dating app.  

And when you’re not at Colorado Gold, head to readings at the bookstore or library, sign up for online classes, put yourself around fellow writers as much as possible. Engage in person, engage virtually.

Engage, engage, engage – whether you’re published or not, say you’re a writer and say it with pride.

A final thought, a poem from Billy Collins:

It’s called Advice to Writers

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

++

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

Mark Stevens