The Story Behind the Story
The history of what the James Phoenix calls “The Phoenix Project” and a cautionary tale for any aspiring authors out there.
Coming up on fifteen odd years ago I decided I was going to get myself on the New York Times Best Seller List. There was just this one little problem. Other than post cards, letters to friends and family and a few promotional pieces for my business here and there, I had never written anything in my life. I knew I had to educate myself. So I started attending writer’s workshops all over the country, contacted with professional free-lance editors to both critique my work and develop my craft and then I read and wrote my brains out. You can’t write unless you read. I became a fanatic. Television was a real distraction. At first my wife was reluctant, but then she agreed to eliminate it all together. We cancelled our cable connection and haven’t had a TV in years. It was a huge sacrifice,but we seem to be getting along just fine without Snookie & Jersey Shore, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, American Chopper and The Real House Wives of Orange County.
I figured in a year, maybe two at the outside, I’d be picked up by a publisher. It took me almost ten years just to get an agent. The old saw is: Write what you know. Since my background was a seat of my pants entrepreneur, I started out writing about the triumph of the little man overcoming all obstacles and rising to the top though nothing but pluck and the sheer force of his drive and determination.
My first novel was entitled Swinging for the Fence and was the story of family man and factory worker Warren Thayer, pulling himself up by his boot straps and becoming a captain of industry. The genre was family saga, real Horatio Alger kind of stuff. The first of many drafts came in at six hundred and twenty-five odd pages.
I submitted my first draft to my editors who promptly tore it to pieces telling me it wasn’t anywhere near ready for prime time. There were five staff editors involved and over time I contracted with three more off and on. I went through seven rewrites, dropping thousands in editorial fees and I don’t even like to think of how many hours on the computer key board. Finally they gave me their imprimatur as ready to go.
Commercial fiction is one of the fastest tracks in the world. The rewards for successful authors are so enormous that they are difficult for mortal men to get their heads wrapped around. It is estimated that Robert B. Parker has three hundred million books in print, one for every man, woman and child in the country. But of course the greater the rewards, the rougher it gets.
I submitted my work to over two hundred and fifty literary agents and watched as the rejection slips pilled up. It took over a year for all of the agents to get back to me. But there was not one single offer of representation…NOT ONE.
There were more rewrites still and more submissions, same deal, not a single offer of representation. I’ve saved them all. I received exactly five-hundred-eight rejection slips.
Agents act as screening mechanisms for the publishers. For the most part, publishers, even the smaller houses, will not even look at a new author without an agent.
I went back to my editors and was told what I already knew, just how competitive it was. Even a small literary agency will receive on average 10,000 quires from aspiring authors a year. Out of that number the agency may decide to offer representation to thirty…Out of that number, one, maybe two get picked up by a publisher. The numbers are beyond brutal.
There a thousands of writers out there, good writers, people who have dedicated themselves to their craft completely and who turn out true quality work, who slave for years and years and never get a single offer of representation. That’s just the way it is.(There are for fee agencies out there as well, but they’re not for real. No reputable agency will ever charge up front fees. All reputable agencies operate on a strict performance basis. If the author doesn’t get paid, they don’t get paid. I never bothered with for fee agencies.)
“But you told me my work was more than ready for prime time, exceptional in fact,” I said to my senior editor.
My editor’s response: “It is, clearly it is…But the type of novel you’re writing is really no longer in vogue.”
“What?…this after seven rewrites and five hundred-eight rejections?”
“We thought you were just writing this as something to leave behind for your children, kind of autobiographical.”
The editor told me that over the phone. That meant that he caught himself one really lucky break. He was out of arm’s reach. I guess that nobody will ever accuse me of being a quick study, but right then and there light finally dawned on Marblehead. I realized for the very first time those editors were not in the business of mentoring aspiring writers…They were in the business of getting paid for editorial services. They would string me along as long as they possibly could to collect their fees, rough world out there.
I dumped them and hooked up with a whole new staff of editors, who’s advice I took with a grain of salt. I switched genres completely going to Mystery, using Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and especially Robert B. Parker as my role models and started all over again from square one.
Switching genres was a long way from a walk in the park. I had to learn a whole new style before I could even begin to start. Once on track, going back and forth with my new editors, it took me a full fifteen months to complete my first novel, Frame Up, and get the imprimatur as being ready for prime time. Close to three years after my switch to my new genre, I submitted to the exact same agents who gave me the cold shoulder with my first effort. While waiting for them to get back to me, I started and completed volume #2 in my series, Loose Ends. I had learned a little something along the way. Loose Ends was completed in fifty-four days, with the full approval of my entire editorial staff.
It was night and day. There were six offers of representation within sixty days. I selected The Schiavone Literary Agency largely based upon the principal’s educational background. James Schiavone was a full professor with an Ed.D, (that’s a PhD in Education,) at New York City College and NYU, before starting his second career as a literary agent in 1994. After signing, I submitted Loose Ends as well. That was picked up also, the second novel in the Fenway Burke Mystery Series. They’re scheduled to come out once a year. Within ninety days there were eight offers of publication. I signed with White Cap Publishing because though there were offers from much bigger publishers, White Cap offered the highest royalty.
That was when I encountered yet another hurtle. Publishers do a great job of putting books on the shelf. But then for the most part, they just sit back and hope for the best. If a writer’s work is placed on the shelves along with fifty thousand other books with absolutely nothing at all to make it stand out…Well, if the work is solid, that writer can make a living at it and over the years build a substantial fan base. I wanted to move a lot faster than that.
The idea all along was to get my name up in lights. This is America after all. All things are possible.
Promotion is most always left pretty much to the author. Unless of course you’re Snooki, Sarah Palin or some other bright light, then all bets are off. (I don’t mean to compare Sarah to Snooki. Sarah’s much taller.)
I didn’t have a lot left to throw at promotion. That meant I had to somehow put the coin together to get the word out, yet another major project. My big saving grace on that one though, was I was simply plugging my work into the massive fan base my hero, the late Robert B. Parker, had left behind. It’s not as if I were starting from scratch.
The high-end royalty White Cap Publishing offered was scheduled to go right back in for promotion. That was one of the big reasons I choose White Cap in the first place. Through them I pledged 100% of my royalties to promotion and promotion related expenses for as long as it takes. And here I broke some brand new ground. Small studios raise money through investors for their films all the time, but as far as I’ve been able to find out, I’m the very first author to ever fund book promotion though investors. I brought in a half dozen people who thought I knew what I was doing, and had to turn another half dozen away once I had put together what I thought I needed.
The long-term game plan is to release at least one Fenway Burke novel a year until they shovel the dirt on me. I’m one hundred odd pages into volume #3, Kestrel, which is an homage to Dashiell Hammetts’ ground breaking 1930 novel, The Maltase Falcon.
There’s a spin of series in the works as well, El Gallo & Flaco. I’m taking a page out of Robert B. Parker’s book here. He’s best know to us for his long running Spenser & Hawk Mystery series...But you can only come out with one novel a year with recurrent characters. It’s a matter of over exposure. As Stephen King tells us, “They all start to taste like beans.”
Parker’s solution was to come out with his spin off Jesse Stone Mystery series, with Tom Selleck playing the lead in the movie versions. That way Parker was able to publish two novels a year instead of just the one...El Gallo & Flaco is my version of Jesse Stone and you can expect to see cameo appearances of the characters from both the Fenway Burke Series and the El Gallo & Flaco Series going back and forth in my work...That way, they both end up promoting each other.
I’m not what you’d call the breath of springtime. I just turned sixty-five this July. But I neither smoke nor drink, watch what I eat, am a habituate at the Sterling Y in Beverly where I get dropped off seven days a week to lift weights and then follow it all up with a run home. I’m very well known there and have met some really wonderful people.
There are different routes I take, but that run home is anywhere from three to ten miles, depending on my schedule. So the odds are I’ll be around for a while. Maybe it’s optimistic, maybe it’s not, but I plan to release twenty Fenway Burke and twenty El Gallo & Flaco novels before my clock runs out…We’ll see how that works out, but I figure for sure, unless I get run over by a bus, I ought to be good for at least ten to twenty and with any luck at all a lot more than that.
I can’t begin to tell you how many friends and family seeing this whole process unfold, shook their heads and said to me: “This is insane. Why don’t you just bag the whole thing?” I can say truthfully that the thought never occurred to me. I can also say that without the support and encouragement of the one and only person in this world who right from the very start actually was convinced I knew what I was doing, there’s just no way I could ever have gotten this far…My lovely bride, Susan, deserves a red Ferrari for sure. And if she plays her cards right, I’ll let her drive it once in a while too.
The rest is history, but by my best estimates, counting all my rewrites and the rewrites of those rewrites rewrites, I’ve penned at least 8000 pages at the minimum. If you use the standard 250 words per page, that works out to around 2,000,000 words… I’ll write that out for you, because even I can’t believe it, that’s TWO MILLION WORDS.
To put that into some kind of prospective, Tolstoy’s epic novel War & Peace comes in complete at 1240 pages…That means effectively, that in order to reach this point, I’ve written War & Peace at least 6. 5 times. And trust me, that is a very conservative estimate.
There’s a memoir in the works called Relentless, detailing my great struggle with The Phoenix Project and highlighting another aspect of my personality that only very recently came to light...An aspect that doubtless played a huge role, not only in my ability to stick with it for fifteen odd years with my literary project and finally get the job done, but a trait that had a major impact from early childhood on. I’m talking about my very late in life diagnosis with high end ADHD.
Coming up on six years ago, I managed to get my second DUI. They were more than twenty-five years apart, but still, it was my second. I didn’t drink every day. There were times where I’d go months without a drink. But when I did drink, I didn’t fool around and quickly found myself out of control.
Finally with my second DUI I resolved to eliminate alcohol all together but figured it’d be a good plan to get some help. I had heard of a drug call Anti-Buse, which has been around since the forties. If you’re on it and drink, it makes you deathly ill.
I went to my doctor and asked her to give me a prescription. She told me I’d have to get it from a shrink and referred me to one. The shrink told me she’d be happy to prescribe Anti-Buse but her comment was: “That’s just a band aid. You’ll always have problems with alcohol unless you treat your primary condition.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Her eyes opened wide. “You mean you don’t know? I can give you a test right now, but I picked up on it in the first five minutes of our session. You have an over the top high end text book diagnosis of ADHD. It’s surprising you can function at all.”
She gave me that test and I scored off the charts. James Phoenix diagnosed with ADHD at the age of sixty.
Then she explained exactly what ADHD was. How that people with the condition are often highly creative, how they are bombarded by a million random thoughts and find it impossible to concentrate on anything, how they’re typically very scattered.
But how in some cases, and I’m a classic case in point, they subconsciously develop skill sets to deal with the condition. One such skill, which I had used for years, was the list thing. Every morning I’d write out a list of things I had to accomplish that day.
The building I was in could be burning down around my ears. But I’d never smell the smoke or feel the heat, as I’d be completely focused on my list, checking them off one by one. If running out of that burning building wasn’t on that list, I wouldn’t get it done.
It’s called Hyper Focus and I can point to instance after instance in my life all the way back to early childhood, where this ability to zoom in on the task at hand with laser like focus while ignoring anything and everything else played a major role in my ultimately succeeding at the task at hand.
She did not put me on Anti-Buse but instead put me on a non-narcotic ADHD pill called Welbutrin. It helps the body produce the exact same endorphins as it produces with rigorous exercise. This pill, combined with my heavy work out schedule, seems to have done the job. I haven’t had a drink in years and don’t plan to for the full balance of my voyage on Space Ship Earth.
I myself see no change in my day to day behavior pattern. But my lovely bride tells me, if I ever go off of it, she’ll call the large animal veterinarian and have me put down. My surmise is, it’s just possible Welbutrin has had an impact.
I hooked up with a national non-profit out of Landover, MD, called CHADD, Children & Adults with Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder. They do wonderful work. I’ve pledged both my time and a portion of the royalties from Relentless, An ADHD Memoir, to that agency.
I’ve paid some dues. Funny, isn’t it? I’m not sure which, the ADHD factor, hard headed or just plan nuts, but the title of my very first failed literary project sums up very nicely just what this grand adventure of mine is all about. For the entire fourteen years and to this very day, I never once, not even for a minute, ever stopped Swinging for the Fence.
Coming up on fifteen odd years ago I decided I was going to get myself on the New York Times Best Seller List. There was just this one little problem. Other than post cards, letters to friends and family and a few promotional pieces for my business here and there, I had never written anything in my life. I knew I had to educate myself. So I started attending writer’s workshops all over the country, contacted with professional free-lance editors to both critique my work and develop my craft and then I read and wrote my brains out. You can’t write unless you read. I became a fanatic. Television was a real distraction. At first my wife was reluctant, but then she agreed to eliminate it all together. We cancelled our cable connection and haven’t had a TV in years. It was a huge sacrifice,but we seem to be getting along just fine without Snookie & Jersey Shore, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, American Chopper and The Real House Wives of Orange County.
I figured in a year, maybe two at the outside, I’d be picked up by a publisher. It took me almost ten years just to get an agent. The old saw is: Write what you know. Since my background was a seat of my pants entrepreneur, I started out writing about the triumph of the little man overcoming all obstacles and rising to the top though nothing but pluck and the sheer force of his drive and determination.
My first novel was entitled Swinging for the Fence and was the story of family man and factory worker Warren Thayer, pulling himself up by his boot straps and becoming a captain of industry. The genre was family saga, real Horatio Alger kind of stuff. The first of many drafts came in at six hundred and twenty-five odd pages.
I submitted my first draft to my editors who promptly tore it to pieces telling me it wasn’t anywhere near ready for prime time. There were five staff editors involved and over time I contracted with three more off and on. I went through seven rewrites, dropping thousands in editorial fees and I don’t even like to think of how many hours on the computer key board. Finally they gave me their imprimatur as ready to go.
Commercial fiction is one of the fastest tracks in the world. The rewards for successful authors are so enormous that they are difficult for mortal men to get their heads wrapped around. It is estimated that Robert B. Parker has three hundred million books in print, one for every man, woman and child in the country. But of course the greater the rewards, the rougher it gets.
I submitted my work to over two hundred and fifty literary agents and watched as the rejection slips pilled up. It took over a year for all of the agents to get back to me. But there was not one single offer of representation…NOT ONE.
There were more rewrites still and more submissions, same deal, not a single offer of representation. I’ve saved them all. I received exactly five-hundred-eight rejection slips.
Agents act as screening mechanisms for the publishers. For the most part, publishers, even the smaller houses, will not even look at a new author without an agent.
I went back to my editors and was told what I already knew, just how competitive it was. Even a small literary agency will receive on average 10,000 quires from aspiring authors a year. Out of that number the agency may decide to offer representation to thirty…Out of that number, one, maybe two get picked up by a publisher. The numbers are beyond brutal.
There a thousands of writers out there, good writers, people who have dedicated themselves to their craft completely and who turn out true quality work, who slave for years and years and never get a single offer of representation. That’s just the way it is.(There are for fee agencies out there as well, but they’re not for real. No reputable agency will ever charge up front fees. All reputable agencies operate on a strict performance basis. If the author doesn’t get paid, they don’t get paid. I never bothered with for fee agencies.)
“But you told me my work was more than ready for prime time, exceptional in fact,” I said to my senior editor.
My editor’s response: “It is, clearly it is…But the type of novel you’re writing is really no longer in vogue.”
“What?…this after seven rewrites and five hundred-eight rejections?”
“We thought you were just writing this as something to leave behind for your children, kind of autobiographical.”
The editor told me that over the phone. That meant that he caught himself one really lucky break. He was out of arm’s reach. I guess that nobody will ever accuse me of being a quick study, but right then and there light finally dawned on Marblehead. I realized for the very first time those editors were not in the business of mentoring aspiring writers…They were in the business of getting paid for editorial services. They would string me along as long as they possibly could to collect their fees, rough world out there.
I dumped them and hooked up with a whole new staff of editors, who’s advice I took with a grain of salt. I switched genres completely going to Mystery, using Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and especially Robert B. Parker as my role models and started all over again from square one.
Switching genres was a long way from a walk in the park. I had to learn a whole new style before I could even begin to start. Once on track, going back and forth with my new editors, it took me a full fifteen months to complete my first novel, Frame Up, and get the imprimatur as being ready for prime time. Close to three years after my switch to my new genre, I submitted to the exact same agents who gave me the cold shoulder with my first effort. While waiting for them to get back to me, I started and completed volume #2 in my series, Loose Ends. I had learned a little something along the way. Loose Ends was completed in fifty-four days, with the full approval of my entire editorial staff.
It was night and day. There were six offers of representation within sixty days. I selected The Schiavone Literary Agency largely based upon the principal’s educational background. James Schiavone was a full professor with an Ed.D, (that’s a PhD in Education,) at New York City College and NYU, before starting his second career as a literary agent in 1994. After signing, I submitted Loose Ends as well. That was picked up also, the second novel in the Fenway Burke Mystery Series. They’re scheduled to come out once a year. Within ninety days there were eight offers of publication. I signed with White Cap Publishing because though there were offers from much bigger publishers, White Cap offered the highest royalty.
That was when I encountered yet another hurtle. Publishers do a great job of putting books on the shelf. But then for the most part, they just sit back and hope for the best. If a writer’s work is placed on the shelves along with fifty thousand other books with absolutely nothing at all to make it stand out…Well, if the work is solid, that writer can make a living at it and over the years build a substantial fan base. I wanted to move a lot faster than that.
The idea all along was to get my name up in lights. This is America after all. All things are possible.
Promotion is most always left pretty much to the author. Unless of course you’re Snooki, Sarah Palin or some other bright light, then all bets are off. (I don’t mean to compare Sarah to Snooki. Sarah’s much taller.)
I didn’t have a lot left to throw at promotion. That meant I had to somehow put the coin together to get the word out, yet another major project. My big saving grace on that one though, was I was simply plugging my work into the massive fan base my hero, the late Robert B. Parker, had left behind. It’s not as if I were starting from scratch.
The high-end royalty White Cap Publishing offered was scheduled to go right back in for promotion. That was one of the big reasons I choose White Cap in the first place. Through them I pledged 100% of my royalties to promotion and promotion related expenses for as long as it takes. And here I broke some brand new ground. Small studios raise money through investors for their films all the time, but as far as I’ve been able to find out, I’m the very first author to ever fund book promotion though investors. I brought in a half dozen people who thought I knew what I was doing, and had to turn another half dozen away once I had put together what I thought I needed.
The long-term game plan is to release at least one Fenway Burke novel a year until they shovel the dirt on me. I’m one hundred odd pages into volume #3, Kestrel, which is an homage to Dashiell Hammetts’ ground breaking 1930 novel, The Maltase Falcon.
There’s a spin of series in the works as well, El Gallo & Flaco. I’m taking a page out of Robert B. Parker’s book here. He’s best know to us for his long running Spenser & Hawk Mystery series...But you can only come out with one novel a year with recurrent characters. It’s a matter of over exposure. As Stephen King tells us, “They all start to taste like beans.”
Parker’s solution was to come out with his spin off Jesse Stone Mystery series, with Tom Selleck playing the lead in the movie versions. That way Parker was able to publish two novels a year instead of just the one...El Gallo & Flaco is my version of Jesse Stone and you can expect to see cameo appearances of the characters from both the Fenway Burke Series and the El Gallo & Flaco Series going back and forth in my work...That way, they both end up promoting each other.
I’m not what you’d call the breath of springtime. I just turned sixty-five this July. But I neither smoke nor drink, watch what I eat, am a habituate at the Sterling Y in Beverly where I get dropped off seven days a week to lift weights and then follow it all up with a run home. I’m very well known there and have met some really wonderful people.
There are different routes I take, but that run home is anywhere from three to ten miles, depending on my schedule. So the odds are I’ll be around for a while. Maybe it’s optimistic, maybe it’s not, but I plan to release twenty Fenway Burke and twenty El Gallo & Flaco novels before my clock runs out…We’ll see how that works out, but I figure for sure, unless I get run over by a bus, I ought to be good for at least ten to twenty and with any luck at all a lot more than that.
I can’t begin to tell you how many friends and family seeing this whole process unfold, shook their heads and said to me: “This is insane. Why don’t you just bag the whole thing?” I can say truthfully that the thought never occurred to me. I can also say that without the support and encouragement of the one and only person in this world who right from the very start actually was convinced I knew what I was doing, there’s just no way I could ever have gotten this far…My lovely bride, Susan, deserves a red Ferrari for sure. And if she plays her cards right, I’ll let her drive it once in a while too.
The rest is history, but by my best estimates, counting all my rewrites and the rewrites of those rewrites rewrites, I’ve penned at least 8000 pages at the minimum. If you use the standard 250 words per page, that works out to around 2,000,000 words… I’ll write that out for you, because even I can’t believe it, that’s TWO MILLION WORDS.
To put that into some kind of prospective, Tolstoy’s epic novel War & Peace comes in complete at 1240 pages…That means effectively, that in order to reach this point, I’ve written War & Peace at least 6. 5 times. And trust me, that is a very conservative estimate.
There’s a memoir in the works called Relentless, detailing my great struggle with The Phoenix Project and highlighting another aspect of my personality that only very recently came to light...An aspect that doubtless played a huge role, not only in my ability to stick with it for fifteen odd years with my literary project and finally get the job done, but a trait that had a major impact from early childhood on. I’m talking about my very late in life diagnosis with high end ADHD.
Coming up on six years ago, I managed to get my second DUI. They were more than twenty-five years apart, but still, it was my second. I didn’t drink every day. There were times where I’d go months without a drink. But when I did drink, I didn’t fool around and quickly found myself out of control.
Finally with my second DUI I resolved to eliminate alcohol all together but figured it’d be a good plan to get some help. I had heard of a drug call Anti-Buse, which has been around since the forties. If you’re on it and drink, it makes you deathly ill.
I went to my doctor and asked her to give me a prescription. She told me I’d have to get it from a shrink and referred me to one. The shrink told me she’d be happy to prescribe Anti-Buse but her comment was: “That’s just a band aid. You’ll always have problems with alcohol unless you treat your primary condition.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Her eyes opened wide. “You mean you don’t know? I can give you a test right now, but I picked up on it in the first five minutes of our session. You have an over the top high end text book diagnosis of ADHD. It’s surprising you can function at all.”
She gave me that test and I scored off the charts. James Phoenix diagnosed with ADHD at the age of sixty.
Then she explained exactly what ADHD was. How that people with the condition are often highly creative, how they are bombarded by a million random thoughts and find it impossible to concentrate on anything, how they’re typically very scattered.
But how in some cases, and I’m a classic case in point, they subconsciously develop skill sets to deal with the condition. One such skill, which I had used for years, was the list thing. Every morning I’d write out a list of things I had to accomplish that day.
The building I was in could be burning down around my ears. But I’d never smell the smoke or feel the heat, as I’d be completely focused on my list, checking them off one by one. If running out of that burning building wasn’t on that list, I wouldn’t get it done.
It’s called Hyper Focus and I can point to instance after instance in my life all the way back to early childhood, where this ability to zoom in on the task at hand with laser like focus while ignoring anything and everything else played a major role in my ultimately succeeding at the task at hand.
She did not put me on Anti-Buse but instead put me on a non-narcotic ADHD pill called Welbutrin. It helps the body produce the exact same endorphins as it produces with rigorous exercise. This pill, combined with my heavy work out schedule, seems to have done the job. I haven’t had a drink in years and don’t plan to for the full balance of my voyage on Space Ship Earth.
I myself see no change in my day to day behavior pattern. But my lovely bride tells me, if I ever go off of it, she’ll call the large animal veterinarian and have me put down. My surmise is, it’s just possible Welbutrin has had an impact.
I hooked up with a national non-profit out of Landover, MD, called CHADD, Children & Adults with Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder. They do wonderful work. I’ve pledged both my time and a portion of the royalties from Relentless, An ADHD Memoir, to that agency.
I’ve paid some dues. Funny, isn’t it? I’m not sure which, the ADHD factor, hard headed or just plan nuts, but the title of my very first failed literary project sums up very nicely just what this grand adventure of mine is all about. For the entire fourteen years and to this very day, I never once, not even for a minute, ever stopped Swinging for the Fence.