The Wall of Unwanted Books

By

Charles Atkins

" I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

--Henry David Thoreau

Do all authors have a drawer of unpublished books?  Or is this just me?  As I hit the final pre-release weeks of one-such manuscript that will finally be published, there are numerous lessons to be learned.  But as so much with writing it's more about the showing than the telling.  So here's the story of how VULTURES AT TWILIGHT, which I wrote over a decade ago as a charming Connecticut cozy with two older female protagonists (for those not used to the term "cozy" it refers to a not-terribly gory murder mystery often set in a small town--Agatha Christie's Miss Marple is the archetype), will now come out as my first lesbian-themed novel.

How does this happen?  Well, in the late 1990's I achieved a major score--or more accurately my agent did--by landing a two-book deal with St. Martin's Press.  My first novel--THE PORTRAIT--did well and so I set about crafting a follow up book.  My editor at St. Martin's was Ruth Cavin--a legend in the field--who at the time was in her early eighties.  I was also working as a geriatric psychiatrist. My thought--write what you know--was to do a mainstream mystery but this time have heroines in their late seventies and early eighties.  I set the book in a fictional Connecticut town that thrives off the systematic fleecing of its older residents as they downsize and die.  It was a theme I knew well from my day job, and so I constructed a darkly comic mystery where the local antique dealers were getting bumped off one by one.  I finished the manuscript, had a few people read it, did a rewrite or two, then off to my agent who submitted it to Ruth at St. Martins...who hated it.  Her rejection letter was scathing.  This was not going to be the second book in that contract.  And therein lies one of the many lessons I've learned--read your contracts carefully.  A multi-book deal does not mean that the publisher is obliged to print whatever you send.  Ruth did not care for the book, and so it was not going to press, at least not then and not with St. Martin's.

My then agent, shopped it around a bit, but clearly I needed to get back to the drawing board and come up with something to fulfill my contract and so VULTURES AT TWILIGHT--at the time it was actually named DOILIES UNDER GLASS--landed in a drawer.  To be fully accurate this is more of a shelf that over the years has taken on the look of a brick wall made out of tightly stacked manuscript boxes with titles of the enclosed, often with dates, written on the side in black sharpie.  Time elapsed I came up with two more books for St. Martin's, which they did publish.  Between books I'd dust of VULTURES AT TWILIGHT, give it a rewrite, send it out, read the rejection letters and then slide it lovingly back into my wall of unwanted books.

At one point there was a near hit with a small specialty publishing house--they will go unnamed.  They had a series of professional readers review the manuscript, it looked promising.  They held onto VULTURES for eighteen months as an exclusive submission, before ultimately rejecting it.  At least here, I could read the critiques from their readers, and came away with the conviction that indeed this book was publishable.  I gleaned anything of value from the reviews and I re-worked the manuscript yet again.  But with no likely buyers in site the options were limited.  Do I self publish?  Or...back onto the shelf?

Here, I was a torn.  Self publishing has become increasingly acceptable and affordable.  Yet part of me clings to the notion that if no one in the "real" publishing world is ready to give it a go, maybe it needs to stay on the shelf.  And while the differences between self-publishing and having a publisher bring out a book have become fewer there are still some big hurdles that the self-published author must consider.  Most notably, how do you get a self-published book reviewed in the bigger publications?  Not to mention I really do like that initial advance check.    

So VULTURES sat on the shelf until I got a call from my agent Al Zuckerman--and any author should be so lucky to have an agent like Al.  He'd just had lunch with the editor at a gay-themed publishing house, and he'd brought up my name.  He wondered if I was interested in writing a mystery or thriller series with a gay protagonist.  Looking back at my wall of unwanted books, I spotted my very first manuscript--a rambling six-hundred page story of a conflicted gay surgeon.  It's part love story, part action adventure, part mystery, part buddy book and total mess.  It's quite possibly the worst thing I've ever written.  So I told him I'd think about it, and while I was deep into another project gave it serious thought.  Which is when it hit me.  What if...What if the two women protagonists in VULTURES fell in love with another?  They were already the best of friends, was it such a leap?  As it stood, the book had no love line and this made tremendous sense.  In discussing it with a gay friend of mine she thought it would work, but I'd need to make them a bit younger--and so I did.  It took a solid two months to get a strong rewrite, and what emerged is a book that is a tremendous amount of fun.  However....

By the time it was ready to be submitted to the gay-themed publishing house, they'd gone through radical restructuring and the editor I'd written this for, had left.  So back to the shelf...or so I thought.  And this is where we get our happy ending, or maybe a fresh start.  Unbeknownst to me, my agent had forwarded the new gay-themed VULTURES AT TWILIGHT to Severn House, a British independent who's published my last two hard covers.  Sure enough they wanted it, but only as a series.  If I could commit to at least a second book with my two heroines--Lil and Ada--it was a go.  And now VULTURES AT TWILIGHT will be released in January 2012 in the U.K. and later this year in the U.S. with the e-version to follow a few months later.  And the moral of this story, which is old and worth revisiting, persistence does pay, and often in unexpected and wonderful ways.