SDSU Conference
This is the weekend for the San Diego State Writers Conference. If you’re there, good luck with your quest. SDSU is among the best of these events, well organized, high quality people and designed to bring writers, editors, and agents into proximity at various functions throughout the weekend. They have the Editor’s Choice awards which my pal David Isaak won a few years back. No surprise there. He and Pamela took us to Old Town the real one the one in the park. That was fun.
This was two years ago. My meetings were with Paul Stevens at TOR and Stacy Creamer of Brioadway. Paul liked my sample, Stacy was polite. My sample was the opening ten pages to a novel called An Aztec in Central Park. Stacy was alarmed to discover that the character, Tubby Ingram, was a small time crook whose art gallery in Hells Kitchen is a front. Who else would open an art gallery on Ninth Avenue? Anyway Paul offered some notes and said he didn’t know what to do with the book. My former agent ambushed me in the hall by shouting my name. A few months later I signed with Bert. He doesn’t like crime fiction, so we work on other things: non-fiction, Ways to Die in the Congo and the historical novel. Bert is a great editor. When he writes ‘barf’ in the margin next to one of my paragraphs I take it he wants me to change it.
Meanwhile Poisoned Pen has asked to see the full manuscript of Flamingo Dawn which is a book in the series with Aztec. Josh Long at Rugged Land read it and had nice things to say but they weren’t planning any crime fiction last summer. I try not to think about the process which began last August with a query and a partial. Flamingo Dawn is not for everyone. One of the PP readers found it off putting saying everyone in the book was corrupt. But they asked for the manuscript. All anyone can ask for is a shot.
I’ll post the opening pages to Aztec tomorrow. I have figured out that the Swiss flags on this new dashboard are file folders. I’m on the cutting edge now.