Publishing, Part III

After I wrote my second novel, I became quite used to the lifestyle of writing a novel a summer.  It's such a therapy to leave the real world enter the new world you are creating.  It's like daydreaming and writing it down at the same time.  Steven King said that the key to writing a novel is to put a few characters in a situation and "watch them work their way out."  This would seem to indicate that the writer is part of the action, just a reporter watching it all happen.  That's what it felt like.

So in the summertime I would get up at 4:00 in the morning, put on a pot of coffee, and watch the sun rise from over the top of my computer screen.  Putting in a half-hearted effort, I sent out quite a few queries, this time paying attention to the publishers' requirements.  Still I only sent to those publishers who wanted just a query letter.  I also branched out to include presses outside of New York and discovered that so many of them specialized in young adult fiction.  I was hopeful, but still received impersonal rejections. 

I decided that maybe I was going about the process all wrong.  Instead of going straight to the publisher, maybe I should leave the process to the experts.  So I started querying agents.  I read two books on the topic and quickly found they were a tougher bunch than editors to impress. 

At this point I had been writing novels for nearly a decade and had managed to sell only one little article to a hunting magazine.  So I focused on writing.  It was so addictive to pump out material, and so disheartening to get rejection letters in the mail that I just wrote. I told myself that I could publish whenever I wanted, but in reality I was hiding behind my computer screen instead. On a positive note, I accumulated quite a bit of material.  I had written three novels and a non-fiction book before I was introduced to Mark.

Mark D. Williams is a writer from Amarillo that impressed me right from the start.  Introduced to me through my sister-in-law, I gave him a call just as he was about to go away to Colorado to fish for a summer.  He and his buddy W. Chad McPhail were researching for a book titled Colorado Flyfishing, Where to Eat, Sleep, Fish. 
http://www.amazon.com/Colorado-Fly-Fishing-Where-Sleep/dp/1555664423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352508796&sr=8-1&keywords=Colorado+Flyfishing+Mark+D.+Williams

The two were getting paid to fly fish Colorado for a summer and I was completely jealous!  What a great idea!  That summer we communicated mostly through e-mail.  Whenever he would make it to a wifi zone, he would take care of his book business, but he always had time to talk to me.  Here I was this needy guy who knew very little about the business and he was super busy writing his own book.  Still he always got back to me.

He introduced me to the sports editor at the Amarillo Globe and hoped I would gain a little confidence by getting some articles in print.  So in April of 2010 I sold an article about white bass fishing.  I had been kicked to the curb by the industry for over ten years to that point, and just seeing my name in print was a spirit lifter.  In the next two years I would publish another ten or so articles.  At the same time, Mark taught me how to write a good query letter.  So in the summer of 2012, having now written five books, I decided for the first time to make a real, determined effort to get one of them published. 

But that's a story for another day.