How Hollywood happened
Life is a funny thing that toys with our emotions, raises us up, tears us down and dusts us back off again.
The proof of the pudding in that statement came one month ago today when I opened an email from a publisher I didn’t know. They were responding to a query letter I sent about a novel I wrote last year. They hated my writing.
Before we get to that let me give you some background on the book and the harsh realities of the publishing world. Everyone says they want to write a book someday and while I have written more than a thousand newspaper columns, hundreds of short stories and three children’s picture books, I had never tried to write a full-length novel.
The reason is simple, I was afraid. To write a novel you have to start with the length, which for most publishers must be 80,000 words. Some will settle on 60,000 but most want 80k. I wasn’t a math whiz but if a typical chapter runs you two-thousand words, that means you have to come up with 40 chapters. No small task, especially if you want them all to be interesting.
Once you’ve written the book you have to send it out to strangers who will likely ignore it or worse yet, read it and trash it. Some publishers will accept unsolicited work, but many won’t even look at what you’ve written unless you have an agent. How do you get one of those? Same way, you send them your work and hope they don’t throw it in the garbage.
Because of my children’s books I did have an agent to send out my novel. It was the required 80,000 words and took me nearly five months to write in my spare time. I thought it was pretty good, but you never know what the world will think. The agent read it and liked it. An editor read it and cried, good tears. So, I was hopefully based on my two people focus group that the book had a shot.
That was October of last year when the agent started sending it out. Then, crickets. Nothing. Nobody wanted it, most didn’t even dignify the effort with a phony reply, they just “ghost” you as the kids today would say. That means they vanish.
Once June of this year hit, I could tell my agent was ready to give up, so I started sending it out, hoping perhaps he wasn’t doing a proper job selling my book. I too was either ignored or told they liked the premise, but the book wasn’t for them. Which leads me back to the email I mentioned in the first paragraph of this column.
That email didn’t just reject the book, the editor told me I didn’t know how to write in a way that any publisher would want. She gave me examples of what was wrong with my novel, starting with the first page and then sent me links to websites that I could go to, hoping to learn how to write a novel the proper way. I knew my style was different than many writers because I have a journalist’s background but I’ve always looked at writing this way; if you get to the bottom of page one and can’t wait to see what’s on page two, I’ve done my job as a writer.
Never one to burn bridges I thanked the editor for the notes and did look at the websites she recommended, which demonstrated that I was not writing like many “romance” or “mystery” writers. She told me if I re-wrote the entire book in the style she wanted, she might publish it because she did like the story.
I told her I could sooner transform into a unicorn than change how I write. That’s not a knock on her, that’s a crack on me and my limitations.
So, one month ago I had no book deal and was told to go back to square one. Then the miracle happened. A publisher who like my previous work loved the book and said they wanted it. Then the second miracle happened, a Hollywood director I had reached out to in March finally got back to me and asked if he could read the book.
He did so in one sitting and told me he loved it and wanted to buy the movie rights to the story and try to sell it to Hallmark, Lifetime or one of those channels that people watch curled up in their pink Snuggie on the couch.
There is no guarantee that the novel will be a success or that this nice man from L.A. will be able to convince a movie studio to tell my fictional story on the screen. What I do know for certain, is that I had to get kicked in the teeth quite a few times by strangers before someone finally came along who liked the work. I’ve always been told the Grand Canyon was created by water and wind over a long period of time.
I never quite believed it until now. Time and patience really can work magic if you believe in them and sometimes the miracle does happen.
My novel “Manchester Christmas” comes out in December, but you can pre-order it now on Amazon. We’ll need another miracle for the movie to happen but last time I checked there is no limit on those.
I’m hoping it’s a “buy two miracles, get one free” kind of deal.