Leaving a Whodunit Behind

by Jeff Brown
(Stigler, OK, USA)

What a rollercoaster - I wish I'd been a nurse!

I had long been convinced that I would surely die soon. I wasn't ill, other than a pronounced penchant for liquor and flashy young women, I just knew that I wasn't particularly lucky and thought that meant I was bound for a shorter than average life. It wasn't the thought of dying that bothered me. Instead the thought of dying without leaving something behind haunted me terribly. I'd never been drawn to family life or having children - just wasn't my style. Don't get me wrong, I love kids, even taught school for a few years. But the idea of raising them was never a priority. So I had to do something. Leave my mark. Ensure my immortality. And so forth.

I could write well, even pretty good, I knew that. So I decided to write a book.

Hoorah.

My announcement was met with less-than-lukewarm enthusiasm by professors, classmates and friends. "Oh, good for you," they'd say, or something equally lame, never believing that I'd actually carry through from prologue to epilogue. Lots of nay sayers along the way too. "You DO realize that most writers die penniless, only to have their books published AFTER they're dead??" Or a favorite, "What have YOU done that's so interesting?" OR better still, " I wrote a book. I'm just not finished with it."

I'll skip the intense pleasure I derived from hammering out my 800 plus pages and two million keystrokes, half of which I eventually ditched. I did have a blast though. Very cathartic and pleasurable at the very least. Talk about a bore at cocktail parties though. Whew! Once you get past telling someone that you've written a book, there's little else to say for either of you. You either give a short synopsis and tell them to buy it to find out whodunit, or settle for a vacant look and a patronizing statement like, "Oh... how nice." Boring as batshit.

So once I got my jollies as a new novelist and wowed my group of close friends with manuscripts that I'd made for them, I was left with the Quixotean task of facing the big publishing house. Talk about a cluster fight. Can't get accepted without an agent. Can't get an agent without being published.

I actually festooned the wall of my office / spare room with rejection letters a couple hundred at least. Finally, the advent of print on demand came about and it was love at first sight - at least for me. I went with a small POD publisher, who took my money, got me through the process in expedient, albeit bare bones style and proceeded to do a few press releases to help me promote it. I don't think they ever featured my novel on their own site, nor even had a listed genre to fit it. But they did work hard, and put up with a tantrum or two and I appreciate them for all of that. Good folks blazing a trail along with me. Cameraderie is hard to come by in this lonely business, so burn no bridges.

Oh, I sold a couple thousand or so copies to friends, acquaintences and others who sent them to soldiers and friends around the world. That first Christmas was a particularly good selling time for me, as was the following summer. I have reviews from five continents on Amazon - a point of which I'm particularly proud. Still, without a few bucks or any direction to promote my own stuff, I was bogged down in the flea markets, festivals, library signings and chance meetings of folks in my circle who had to have a copy.

Grassroots works though, cuz I DID make money, quite a little bit in fact; and it still sells enough to encourage me to keep going. But an overnight success I wasn't / ain't. But here I go again. I sit down each night after all these years and bang away at characters who I like, and kill a few I don't. That's the great pleasure in writing fiction; you get to do things in your novels you'd normally go to jail for doing in real life.

Satisfaction? Yes. Fame and fortune? Not quite yet.

Keep plugging. That's the best advice.