To commemorate five years in the genre fiction business, I’m writing a series of blog posts about my experiences in the hope they might help new or upcoming writers understand a bit more about the world of agents, indie publishers and the often harsh, often rewarding realities of fiction writing. This is me, Five Years In.
NOVEMBER 19, 2019
Part One "The Acorn that Became the Teeny Tiny Oak"
It’s 2014 and I’m walking through a neighborhood I don’t live in for what feels like the thousandth time over the last twelve months. My cell phone is stuck to my ear and the voice of my then-girlfriend-now-wife (or TGNW) is calming me as my mind storms and my heart ba-ba-dee-boops at an uncomfortable speed as I try to figure out what to do about my Problem. The Problem being that I hate my job at the small marketing agency I’ve been at for two years and I’m getting older-so-much-older (early-forties!) and my writing career is going nowhere.
It’s been over ten years since I left my life as a music executive (and all the fat checks that came with it), four years since my bookstore closed and I went bankrupt, two years since I wormed my way into a salary position after patching together my financial life as a weekends-only overnight security guard at a posh Santa Monica hotel and a full-time telemarketer selling networking bits to phone companies; it’s also been over a decade since my first self-published novel came out (THE EGOTIST, available on Amazon!) and the two subsequent (unpublished) novels were completed, three years since I wrote a Disney children’s movie (SANTA PAWS 2, available on Disney Plus!), and one year since I spent a month in Minnesota working on the production of my original horror-turned-thriller-via-multiple-rewrites Lifetime movie, GIRL MISSING (available On Demand!).
As far as I was concerned, things were stagnant. Stuck. I was withering on the vine.
Something had to be done. Something had to give. Something had to change.
“I need to quit this job, I want to write full time!” I wailed, rending my garments and beating my chest (not really, but you get the idea).
The Other Problem, sadly, was what would I write.
*
I’d been writing since childhood, completing what I now know would be called a novella in the 7th grade called “The Forest” (monster in the woods, neighborhood kids rally… you get it) and in the last decade had cranked out about fifty short stories and three “literary” character-based novels, none of which sold. Anywhere. To anyone. Seemed like quitting my job now that I was slowly getting myself back on sturdy ground financially to write dark character-focused literary novels might not be the smartest move.
“Well,” my TGNW says calmly, “you sold Girl Missing. Maybe you should write more stuff like that.” (I’m paraphrasing, it was a long time ago).
To this day, I still swear there was an audible CLICK inside my head. And I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I physically stopped in my tracks. I stood on the sidewalk, avoiding my desk at the agency a few blocks away, my eyes wide and my jaw a bit slack in wonderment.
In possibilities.
*
I’d always loved horror. Like millions of others, Stephen King reached through the pages and took my teenage hand in his and guided me to the mighty temple of Horror Fiction. As a kid I burned through King, Koontz, and Barker like Bill Cosby through a bowl of pudding (pardon the 1980’s pre-downfall-of-Cosby-the-sexual-deviant metaphor). And now, as an adult, as the warm Los Angeles air settled around me, I realized what I could do. What I would do. It was so simple, so obvious… the only crazy thing was that I hadn’t thought of it before:
“Oh my God, that’s it,” I said. “I’ll write horror.”
So yeah, I quit my job.
I think it was a few weeks after that conversation that I finally got the gumption to walk to the open door of the airplane sans parachute and – with the love and support of my TGNW– jump.
At first, my plan was simple. I’d had some moderate success writing and selling screenplays, so that would be my focus. Within minutes of unemployment, we cleaned out the garage of the house we were renting at the time and converted it into an office. That day, I started banging out horror screenplays, writing a couple pilots and a few feature scripts over the next several months, draining all the ideas percolating in my new horror-themed brain onto the pages.
Then, one late night, we were in bed sleeping and I turned over to notice my TGNW was rolled up in the sheets so tightly, and so completely, that in the milky moonlight coming through the blinds it almost seemed to me that she was wrapped up in a sort of… cocoon.
Well that’s interesting, I thought, and before I fell back asleep I had the general outline of a new story – or at least a new idea – lodged in my head.
The very next morning I went to the office and typed up some notes on the idea, excited and eager to shape into some sort of clean outline. But there was a problem. While I loved the idea and could already see the characters, the main beats, and what would happen at the fatal, horrible, end… I realized that it wasn’t really a screenplay. There wasn’t enough plot to drive a feature or enough story-length, or depth, to kickstart a television series. It was like a short movie. Or, I thought – click – a short story.
I’m not sure if that click was as audible as the one on the sidewalk a few months previous, but it was there all right. A small gate in my brain had snapped opened. At first, I only peeked through that shadowy opening, making sure what lay beyond was safe to traverse, that the path was not too rocky or blocked by dead ends or filled with pitfalls. When I saw that it looked pretty good – heck, it was even going downhill – I not only went through the gate, I ran through it.
I started writing Cocoon with no idea what I was doing or how I was doing it. I’d never written a genre piece before, so I decided to write it with the same structural beats of a screenplay or a novel and with the same literary style I used to write my previous fiction. The only thing I did differently is that I made it, as best I was able, scary.
*
Around this same time I’d made the acquaintance, via Facebook, of an amazing horror writer named Laird Barron, with whose work I had recently fallen in love. I tried – in vain – to option the rights to one of his novellas for a screenplay I wanted to write (a television series, actually), and although I couldn’t afford the asking price from his agent (I was unemployed now, remember), Laird and I continued to converse and quickly became digital pen pals. And so, when I eventually finished a draft of “Cocoon”, I asked Laird if he’d mind taking a look (I didn’t know the term “beta-reader” because I’d never asked anyone to read one of my stories before, to offer critique or feedback, something I now do religiously). Laird, being the insanely nice guy he is, said he’d be happy to.
*
That summer money was getting tight. I was working part-time for a bookstore in downtown Los Angeles called The Last Bookstore, and that same summer I came THIS close to landing a new job – a dream job – with Blumhouse Productions as the head of their new book publishing division. I crushed the meeting with Jason Blum, was flown to New York City to meet with a Senior Editor at Random House while I stayed – really! – in Jason’s NYC apartment. Suffice to say my dreams were shattered. The takeaway is that You Don’t Always Get What You Want. A lesson that would be a recurring theme over the next several years. Luckily, my buddy was a Location Manager in the film/tv world (something I’d worked in for five years earlier in life) and brought me in to work with him on an HBO television show. I took the job and that job became a career. Yada yada, life goes on.
Meanwhile, though, there’s this story, and there’s Laird.
*
Some weeks had passed and then one afternoon I got a PM from Laird, who reached out and asked if we could chat about my story. Like… on the phone. We’d never spoken before and I was nervous, and I was also pretty much under the assumption that Laird was going to let me down gently, to tell me not to give up the day job – as it were – and so on and so forth.
Which leads me to the other day of my writing life I’ll never forget.
At this point, I’m still at the bookstore, so I find a nook in the back of the warehouse, grab a legal pad, and give Laird a call.
The call lasted just over an hour.
I won’t get into the details, because that’s something I’ll forever keep private, but the bottom line was that while “Mother” needed some work (sure, maybe a lot of work), it was certainly publishable (!). As a matter of fact, it could be objectively considered Good.
Potentially, just possibly… Very Good.
I took the advice to heart, because I’m no idiot, and spent the next several weeks rewriting that ten-thousand-word story – adding and subtracting, using my scrawled legal pad pages of notes from my conversation with Laird to fix, adjust, and tweak my first horror story into some sort of publishable shape.
Facebook wasn’t new in 2015, but it was new to me.
I’d begun making online friends with other genre writers, starting in Laird’s circle and spiraling outward. I think the term is Networking, and in those days Facebook was an amazing tool for that. Now, of course, it’s a hellish echo chamber of hate, but at the time it was pretty neat. It was even sort of fun!
One of the writers I’d befriended was a fella named Ted Grau. Ted was fairly new to the scene, as well, although not nearly as freshly-minted as I was. He was about to release his first story collection and had been kind enough to send me a digital ARC to peruse (THE NAMELESS DARK, available on Amazon!). I told him about this story of mine and he made a few suggestions about where I might send it. One of the suggestions was a small press called Dunhams Manor, run by a guy named Jordan Krall. Knowing nothing – I mean nothing – about pitching a story, I got some more advice by Obi-Wan Barron and sent my first query email.
A week later – it might have been days – Krall wrote back.
He loved it.