This is a Freelance Success Story written for Angela Adair-Hoy's site Writers Weekly.

FROM DARK TO DAWN

 I saw book publication success early on. Having started writing seriously in 1990, I sold my first nonfiction book within a year. It was dumb luck. Along with a rather immature query letter, submitted an outline for a games-party book using Roman numerals and the subdivisions a, b, c, and so forth. Great Games for Great Parties: How to throw a perfect party debuted in '91 and has become my little evergreen. It's still selling today - the mark of a true reference book. Great Games was followed rather quickly by my second book in 1993, Your Corner of the Universe: A Guide to Self-Therapy Through Journal Writing. Even though Your Corner was agent-submitted by a very nice man, we got creamed. The deal was a capitulation because I was book hungry and didn't know how to fight or protect my interests. And it was a fine book, despite the horrible cover and even worse treatment.

Then...nothing. I suffered unpublished for the next three years! But I kept creating work, tweaking book proposals, and going to school at night for a degree in criminal justice. It was a "dark time" for me, I assure you. The rejection letters were merciless. The twenty-plus publishing houses in New York at the time were in a state of flux, a case of big corporate fish gustily gobbling their neighbors under the guise of acquisition. Oh, I still wrote a weekly newspaper column and filled each day with writing and school, while trying to maintain a positive demeanor. My family will tell you, though, how hard it was to put up with my whining and jealousy. Being the loving people they were, they would try to convince me that things would break, but it was like waiting for a visit from wandering Hope. No one can be sure she will come.

Somehow, in the cold void of denial, I managed to keep at it, reminding myself how all real players really do pay their dues. We never know what price is truly paid. The media would like to perpetuate the myth of "overnight success." It makes for better press and a much better tale.

Then, pop, pop, pop, pop - like a sprout busting through the earth, my work started to show. Maybe it's because my name reached a kind of threshold that so many people remembered seeing it and editors started to recognize my passion and figured it was safe to take me on. And passion is what drives me. I decided in the beginning I would not be a "One-Note Charlie," the guy who sings the same song over and over for twenty years. And to that end, I wrote about entertaining and parties, forensic science, criminal justice and law, what it's like to raise a monkey as a child, and anything that would sustain me through the long journey required of a book.

For an update, next Spring I will have seven nonfiction books on the market all at the same time. Plus, I still write my weekly column for our newspaper and am teaching eight on-line workshops for both the Romance Writers of America and Painted Rock Writers and Readers Colony. I'm also in negotiations to become an expert for an e-commerce party site and, of course, am creating new book proposals all the time. Yes, I log a lot of hours, probably 70 hours a week. But I'm finding that the "can do" side of me is better than the painful, dark place I lived through before.


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