I've been writing for as long as I can remember. I don't remember the first day I decided to create stories visually; I could have been making little comic books when I was five, maybe six. I was obsessed with writing, and with entertaining myself and others with my imagination. I used to get my parents or sister to sit down and read all my work, almost immediately after I finished it. As I got older, the stories got longer and longer, and by the time I was in my middle teen years, I was ready to take a stab at a novel.
My first effort was a swords & sorcery fantasy novel based on a group of characters that my sister and I made while we played AD&D (that's Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, for the non-geeks out there). It was called Magis Awakening, and it was about three hundred twenty pages. I worked on a sequel but that ultimately failed to light my fire. When the computer I was working on died, I tried to use my backup floppy disk on our next, only to find that it too had broken due to mistreatment.
Oops.
At the same period, I started toying with short fiction of the horror variety. They were terrible, not scary at all, and largely pointless, but they served their purpose. They gave me a training ground, a place to hone my writing. I submitted my first few short stories in this period to various publications -- the usual suspects. At first, my rejections were form letters only, but eventually I started hearing more and more positive feedback.
In this period, I also produced another novel, this one extremely short, maybe 40,000 words. I called it One Over Dead, and it was my Zombie Novel. I was a little more serious here, and tried to give the novel a little depth, a little something for the reader's mind to chew on when they weren't busy watching zombies chew on the characters.
From there, I went to Rock Valley College and worked on a variety of short stories and printed up a "collection" of sorts for my own enjoyment. These were stories of a completely different sort. These were brutal and dark and nihilistic, bloody and no holds barred. Some of them were even good, and earned some positive rejection letters from different publications.
As a result, I finally sat down in late September of 2005 to write a novel that I could see myself submitting professionally. I decided I wanted to finish it in one month, and I was aiming at roughly 60,000 words. I had just quit my job as a janitor so I had plenty of time to write, and write I did. On a few days I made it to 17 pages in a single day. I sped through it and managed to finish it in October, and did some quick revisions and submitted the finished novel, titled See You Tonight, to Wizards of the Coast's Open Call for the Discoveries line.
Meanwhile, I started working on my next novel, Grandma's Big Book O' Death. I had a basic idea of what I wanted it to be about: a woman named Marlee Jordan who inherits a genealogy book that allows her to contact the dead who are written in its pages. When her baby, Shawnee, is stillborn, Marlee decides to write her in, and ends up with Shawnee's spirit returning to her womb.
But beyond that, I had no idea where the story was going, and throughout 2006 I was adventuring in Marlee's head, trying to figure out where she was going. I eventually came up with the concept that a second grieving mother would get control of the book and create a feud that would culminate with terrible violence.
I struggled for a proper title which would reflect the seriousness of my book. Jamie, my wife and the greatest woman in the Universe, came up with the idea for a new title: One More Day. I agreed with her. It was perfect.
While I was still writing One More Day, I received Wizards of the Coast's response to See You Tonight. It was the warmest letter I'd ever received from a professional in the business. It basically said that they liked my novel, but it didn't have enough speculative elements to qualify for what they were trying to do, but they complimented me and told me best of luck elsewhere.
This helped me get my butt in gear to actually finish One More Day. I did as good a job as I could polishing it quickly before submitting it by September.
The waiting for One More Day was the hardest. It was the first novel that I honestly believed had a chance of being published. Before, whenever I submitted, I thought that if someone really picked up my work it would be out of mercy. But One More Day felt different to me. It felt real enough that I thought it could actually do something.
I believe it was April of 2007 when I first heard the response. It was an e-mail, which made me immediately figure it was a rejection, but really it was something far from it: the associate editor at Wizards asked me for the full manuscript. I immediately e-mailed it back to her, and she read through it. On July 31st, 2007, she wrote me the most exciting e-mail I have ever received.
Wizards of the Coast had decided to buy my book.
There would be some changes if I accepted, she told me. The book was too short, first off, and it felt incomplete in several places. I needed approximately 10,000 words, at the very least, for Wizards to publish my novel. But they loved it, and several different people had read it and all agreed it had a lot of promise and they wanted to be the company to carry One More Day into bookstores nationwide.
I received the contract about a week later. I signed it and sent it back.
After working with my editor at Wizards through 2007 and well into 2008, Hasbro decided to cancel its Discoveries line of speculative fiction to concentrate on their new releases of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering -- the tried and true brand names. I was greatly disappointed, but that's the way life goes sometimes . . . you have to roll with the punches or get out.
Time to roll.
