Speech at the Litchfield Rotary Club Luncheon

I was invited to speak at the Litchfield Rotary Club this afternoon.  A good friend and member of the club, Priscilla Loomis, introduced me.  Unfortunately, when given the option, the attendees preferred to hear me read from my novel.  So the speech below was not delivered as such.  The good news is: they enjoyed the prologue and the first chapter of Millers’ Tales, and two people bought books.  Most of the information in the speech was conveyed a little more informally in the Q&A following the reading.  The Rotarians are good people, and I enjoyed talking with them.  I’m open to more such gigs, so let me know if you have a luncheon speaking slot that needs filling.  I’d also love to talk to book groups.

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Thank you, Priscilla, and thank you Ladies and Gentlemen of the Rotary Club for inviting me here to speak to you today.  As Priscilla mentioned I have a Bachelor’s in English and an MFA in Fiction Writing both from Columbia University. So I’m sure it comes as no surprise to anyone that I have made my living for the past fifteen years predominantly through computer programming. Right now, I’m doing a web/database project for the Education Connection. I am cursed with the ability to do reasonably well something which puts more than enough food on the table — my figure certainly belies the notion of the starving artist — but which does precious little to nourish my soul. Don’t take that as a complaint, just a partial explanation of the rather circuitous route I’ve taken to get from writing student to published author.

I discovered I wanted to be a writer in ninth grade, when I was thirteen years old. I had done poorly on a vocabulary quiz, and the teacher assigned those of us who got below a certain grade to write an essay making use of all the words we had gotten wrong. I turned the essay into a short story. It was about a kidnapping and, in addition to the requisite vocabulary words, was replete with violence and melodrama. The next day in English class, the teacher, Miss Grande, asked me to read my essay aloud. I protested that it was a little long, but she wasn’t having any of it. This was, after all, an assignment given only to those who had done poorly on the quiz, and being that it was very early in the year, I’m sure she figured I was a slacker, who hadn’t done the assignment. So I read the “essay,” and by the end of the first paragraph I had them hooked. My entire ninth grade English class sat in rapt attention, hanging on my every word, and by the time I finished I was hooked. I knew that this was what I wanted to do.

I got a typewriter for my birthday that year, an electric Smith-Corona, and throughout my high school career I continued to write short stories and even took a stab at a novel — or rather the beginning of a novel. But I never knew what to do with these pieces aside from sharing them with friends.

In college, I continued to write, but never considered what it actually meant to become a writer — someone who earned a living from the the words flowing out from his fingertips. It was only later, when job interviewers asked me how fast I could type, that I appreciated the value of a BA in English. Three and a half years at Columbia (I graduated early) had taught me, not writing, but typing.

So, Ivy League educated and clueless, I went to work for my father and spent the worst six months of both our lives in his house and his pillow factory being miserable and making him and my step-mother equally miserable. My friends, seemingly more clued in to this real-world-making-a-living thing, got jobs on Wall Street. Those who didn’t stayed in school, mostly law school. I think the LA Law TV series had a lot to do with that. My father, in fact, kept pushing me to go to law school – I assume he would have preferred one out of state. But I was too disillusioned to go back to school right away — and besides, I’d missed all the application deadlines — so I compromised and got a job as a paralegal, ostensibly to find out what being a lawyer entailed.

Six months into a two year stint as a paralegal I realized that the law was not my calling. In the meantime, I continued to write, still doing nothing with the finished products other than showing them to friends and roommates.

Ultimately, I decided to return to school, not seeing it necessarily as a means to a career, but simply a way to spend the bulk of my time doing what I liked to do. Also, I knew the MFA programs required a collection of short stories or a novel as a Master’s Thesis, and I figured this would be a good way to force myself to write a novel. So I went to school, and I wrote a novel, and I graduated…but no agent ever called. An editor from Harper Collins did not knock on my door. In fact, I now had a novel and no more clue about how to earn a living as a writer than I did before I went into the program. This was the School of the Arts; apparently, at this time at least, they were concerned with the production of art, not the business of art.

Let me also say that while I was getting the MFA, I was teaching Logic and Rhetoric at Columbia and word processing at nights at Goldman Sachs, and along the way I managed to get married. So, when my wife’s first pregnancy coincided with my graduation, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about selling a novel. I needed now, suddenly, to earn a real living.

Once again, it seems that typing — or rather the late Twentieth Century version of typing, word processing — was my most valuable skill. Working nights and eventually graveyard shifts at Goldman, I became an expert in Microsoft Word. In turn, I parlayed that expertise, combined with my teaching experience, into Word training gigs. I got certified in Word and Windows NT, did some tech writing and training, and eventually a freelance help desk gig at a law firm turned into a thirteen year career. I went from help desk analyst to programmer and ultimately to help desk manager.

During this time, my family continued to grow. Unfortunately, our apartment failed to grow along with it. By 1999, there were five of us in a two bedroom on the Upper West Side. Needless to say, I didn’t do a lot of writing. In fact, for seven years after graduating the MFA program, I didn’t write a word. And I didn’t miss it. My kids took all my creative energy outside of work. Apparently I am cut from a different cloth than Vladimir Nabokov, who is reputed to have locked himself in the bathroom of his Paris apartment to write.

But at the end of 2001, we moved to New Milford, and I suddenly found myself with a great deal of personal time on the train each day. I once again had time to write. People thought I was crazy to spend so many hours each day commuting, but the truth was, I liked the commute better than the job.

In the course of seven years commuting, with an average of three hours per day on the train, I managed to write two and a half novels. The first novel, Bliss, was like my short story of twenty years before, replete with violence and melodrama. It also had profanity and graphically depicted sexual situations. It was a heck of a lot of fun to write. When I finished it, I wanted to sell it. I hated my job at this point and was motivated at last to learn how to sell a book.

Of course, once again, I had no clue. I read books and websites about the process and learned about the format for the manuscript and the all important query letter. So I wrote a query and started sending it out to agents. And I got form letter rejections back. In my opinion, this failure was more a reflection of the bad query letter than the novel itself.

While I continued that process of sending letters and receiving rejections, I began a new novel. This time, however, I wanted to write a different kind of book. I determined that, in contrast to the one I had just finished, my new novel would be something my then eleven-year old daughter, Sarah, could read. In fact, I was more ambitious than that, I was determined to hit the Harry Potter sweet spot, and produce a book that would be targeted at young adults, but which grown-ups would enjoy as well.

Sarah and I had just seen Wicked, the Broadway Musical, when I began to think about this project, and I was very much inspired by the musical and by Gregory Maguire’s novel. In addition to Wicked, Maguire had written a few novels that re-imagined traditional fairy tales, and I thought that I might like to try my hand at that. As I began planning the book, I also drew inspiration from Star Wars – Episode III had just come out – and from Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man.

Star Wars gave me the idea of the broad arc, of a character’s rise and fall and ultimate redemption. And from Little Big Man I got the idea of having a very old narrator, who would be looking back on a vast historical period and whose life would have been affected to some degree by historical events. Also, I wanted the story to be distinctly American. I wanted to see what would happen if you took a traditional fairy tale and transplanted the action from a Bavarian forest into an American City, specifically New York.

I planned three books, with each book making use of three fairy tales as its underlying structure. Millers’ Tales is the first of the three. It starts off in the early Twentieth Century, about 1907, where we meet Helen and George Miller in the roles of Hansel and Gretel, who live in a tenement on the Lower East Side and who end up imprisoned in a candy shop/freak show in Coney Island. The second section of the book, called Mr. Big, has Helen taking on the role of the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin. The action there is set toward the end of World War I, during the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919. The third section, called Club Calabash, set at the end of Roaring Twenties, on the cusp of the Great Depression, refocuses on George, who assumes the role of the miller’s son from the Puss ‘N Boots tale, with Bernard the Wolf Boy, whom Helen and George met at the freak show twenty years earlier, assuming the role of Puss.

The challenge here was to weave these three tales together in an organic way, using the fairy tales as the bones of the beast if you will. George and Helen’s abandonment by their parents in the Hansel and Gretel tale, their imprisonment by the sadistic old fortuneteller, Nanna, and the murder they have to commit to escape doesn’t go away at the end of the first tale. These things become part of who they are and deeply inform their thoughts and actions throughout the rest of the stories. The same is true of the events in each of the stories – they change the characters, make them slightly different people.

So, although the novel is somewhat episodic in nature, there is a larger arc to the story and to their lives, which will, in the course of all three novels, span the entire Twentieth Century.

Now, returning to my original stated intention of writing a book that would hit the Harry Potter sweet spot and be for children, but also entertaining to adults – I failed miserably. Millers’ Tales is an adult novel. Not to say it is an adult novel in the same sense that “Debbie Does Dallas” is an adult movie. It is, in fact, devoid of profanity and explicit sexual situations. But it deals with mature themes, often dark themes. Fairy tales are dark in general, and in my hands, they become somewhat darker.

That said, it’s not really any darker than Harry Potter, and the teens and pre-teens who’ve read it seemed to enjoy it. It’s hard to take the word of my own children – they lie to me – but I’ve heard from parents whose children read it that they liked it.

So, having completed this novel, and begun work on the second in the series, I once again began to query agents. This time, I took a course online and I actually paid a third party to write a professional synopsis for me. The course paid off. I got no form letter rejections. Better than 50% of the agents I queried asked to see pages, and several of them asked for the entire manuscript.

One agent read the manuscript in a weekend and then left me an effusive voicemail telling me how much she loved the book. Then she broke her leg and disappeared for several months. When she contacted me again, she had revisions. We spoke at length about the changes she wanted, and I agreed that they would make the book better. I did the rewrites and sent her the revised manuscript. Several weeks later, she sent me an email, telling me how much better the book was, but that she was going to pass on representing it because she doesn’t handle fantasy.

Now I knew why they didn’t teach the selling of fiction at Columbia. Writing it is comparatively easy. Selling it is difficult and frustrating.

Shortly after this experience, my mother, who was dying of lung cancer, declined, and I went to Florida take care of her for about six weeks. Then shortly after my return, I was promoted at work and found myself with very little personal time. I started writing emails and memos instead of fiction. Selling Millers’ Tales and writing the sequel dropped off my radar.

Fortunately, my firm let me go in February, giving me the opportunity to once again focus on writing.

This time, however, I opted to forego the tedious and time consuming query process. Instead, I opted to publish the book myself, using Amazon’s CreateSpace service. Thanks to modern print on demand technology, a new avenue has opened for authors to publish their work without any upfront cost.

It is becoming a more common occurrence for a self-published author to get noticed by agents and editors and end up with a deal with a traditional publisher. The challenge, of course, is to sell enough copies for word of mouth to build. So far, I have done very little to market the book, relying primarily on Facebook and blogging to attract attention. Once again, it is a balancing act, where the demands of family and paying clients come first.

But, little by little, I make headway. Opportunities like this to speak to a group such as yourselves help a great deal. So, I’d like to thank you very much for inviting me to speak here today. I’m hoping what I said will intrigue you enough to make you want to read the book. Beyond that, I’m hoping you’ll enjoy it and recommend it to others.

Thank you very much.