If you don't know the drill, this is another story from my life told in third-person for practice in that exciting and lucrative method of story-telling. A Drama In Real Life if you (and Reader's Digest's lawyers) will allow. This time the names are changed, though to protect the reader rather than the innocent. As my writing partner for that project was also named John, it would just be too confusing (or too last name heavy) to use our real names. So for the purposes of this story, the feckless, younger John (representing me) is Joel, while the substantial, grownup John is Fred. In real life, my co-author is John F. Clark (though the F. does not in fact stand for Fred) and the book is "Hiking South Carolina" from Falcon Press. We sort of got fired off the 2d edition for, uh, not producing one, but I think our names are still on the book. Whether we still get royalties is another question. That is, from the 2d edition. We still get them from the 1st, though I think I'm now better qualified than either Stephen King or Dave Barry to be in the all-author band, The Rock Bottom Remainders. Not that I'm more of an author, but I'm certainly more of a rock-bottom remainder.
Joel was a free-lance do-gooder. He volunteered at the Center for Environmental Policy at the sporadically prestigious University of South Carolina in Columbia. Joel specialized in writing articles read by few and spinning off brilliant ideas for saving the world, or at least the Western hemisphere, listened to by even fewer. One of these ideas was to create a new energy conservation plan for South Carolina and this brought him to the attention of Fred.
Fred could be called a long-time inside agitator for energy and environmental issues within S.C. state government. The particular brilliant idea Joel and Fred worked on met the same fate as most of the others, which was that it couldn't penetrate the University's administration, let alone get a chance to be judged by the foundation at which it was aimed. Too bad so sad, as we said back in the '90s, but Fred had another idea.
Fred was also a long-time Sierra Club member. As such, he had seen a nature guide to South Georgia (the region of the American state, not the South Atlantic island) produced by the local chapter of a major environmental group, the Nature Conservancy probably. He felt that it would be fun, useful and profitable to do something similar for South Carolina, and Joel agreed.
They had gotten as far in their How To Be A Writer handbooks to know that that they needed a book proposal, comprised mostly of three sample chapters. They chose three small (i.e., two or three counties each) areas of the state and set to work. They had a hell of a lot of fun. As they had no particular publisher in mind, they had no publisher's guidelines they had to follow, so they put in whatever occurred to them, including favorite restaurants, local history, local color, and directions to Grandma's house. (OK, they didn't really include the latter, but then neither had a living grandma at that point.)
Eventually (about sixteen years later, I think) they had their package assembled, and sent it out to several regional publishers who seemed like good prospects. The rejection letters came considerably more quickly, and Fred and Joel struck further afield. Eventually, they got down the list to Falcon Press, then of Helena, Montana. Falcon sent an unusually enthusiastic rejection letter. They explained that they couldn't in fact use a nature guide to South Carolina, but what they would really like would be a hiking guide to South Carolina.
Now Fred and Joel had been outdoors before now and then, and even went hiking from time to time assuming the trail had been cleared of large snakes, small snakes, spiders, alligators and any other wildlife of the biting, itching, man-eating and non-cute classes. But what the hell, they thought, how hard can it be?
Another sixteen years later, they had a proposal for a hiking book and sent it off to Montana. And waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, as luck would have it, Fred met a Falcon author (an author for Falcon Press, not an avian one) and asked her if she would mind checking on our manuscript. As even better luck would have it, she actually did. It turned out that the editor for the hiking book series had had a rock-climbing accident and fallen on his head and had been laid up for some time. However, he was all better now. Shortly thereafter a contract arrived in the mail and, except for the whole writing-the-book part, Fred and Joel were published authors.
Thus, Joel and Fred can offer succinct advice to the aspiring young writer: always make sure to submit your manuscript to an editor who falls on his head. Hey, it worked for them.
The tale of the writing of the book is probably for another day. How St. Fred scared the snakes from South Carolina's trails, mainly by almost stepping on them, was certainly a highlight. How Joel skived his way out of doing any actual writing by claiming terminal writer's block and just drew maps instead is amazing as well. However , after only another eighteen years (they wanted the total to be an even 50), Fred and Joel were able to reap the rewards of being published authors. Whatever those might turn out to be.
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