Guilty Pleasures - Laurell K. Hamilton [124]
Then I wrote a sequel to the book and the editor didn’t want it. The first book hadn’t sold well enough, and we’d had a little disagreement about my treatment. I was new and didn’t realize that brand new writers are treated like light bulbs; when one burns out, you can always buy more, screw the next one in, and it lights up just as bright. No, I am not being too harsh about how publishing treats new writers. If anything I’m toning it down. Sorry, for all you aspiring authors out there, but truth is truth, it is a hard business. Shine up the armor around your ego, harden your heart, keep your head down, and write.
I had one novel out, the sequel rejected, my third novel rejected even by my then agent, and no other prospects. (That rejected book was actually a two-hundred-page plot synopsis for what later turned out to be The Lunatic Cafe, book number four of Anita. Different characters but the plot was pretty much cannibalized.) So I looked through my short stories, unpublished, and found a piece about Anita Blake, though I think at that time her last name might have been Black. I’d have to go through my old files to find out for sure. (You do not want me to go into the catacombs and search, because I’d never get this piece finished!) I started a novel, because frankly I didn’t know what else to do.
I was so scared of failing again, of watching my life-long dream of being a writer go up in smoke, that I took the first seventy or so pages to a local Science Fiction convention, Archon. Melinda Snodgrass, who at that time was writing scripts for Star Trek, The Next Generation, was scheduled to do a reading, but for some reason couldn’t do it. So they gave me her room. I was an almost complete unknown, yet the room filled up, standing room only. It would take me a few months to realize that most of them thought I was Melinda Snodgrass, because they didn’t know what she looked like either. A packed room, and I had the first draft of an incomplete book, but I had to know, had to know if it worked, or if I was just wasting my time.
I started reading, and no one left. That crowd of people who had come to hear someone else entirely, read something else entirely different, stayed. Some of them stood for an hour, while I read. People would open the door from the hall, listen for a moment, and come inside to hear more. At the end of that hour I stopped reading because I’d run out of pages. No one clapped. My heart sank into my shoes. Then into that breathless silence came applause, shouts, laughter, cries of joy, and when will it be published, can we hear more? They couldn’t hear more because I’d read them all I had. I had no idea when it would be published because again, I hadn’t finished it. But in that moment, I knew I had something, something special, something that other people, besides just me, cared about, and wanted more of.
I finished the book, sent it off to my agent. She loved it. Then it took two more years for it to sell, because everyone liked it, but no one knew exactly what to do with it. The mystery editors thought it was horror, the horror editors thought it was science fiction or fantasy, the fantasy editors thought it was horror or science fiction, or mystery, well, you get the idea.
The book was rejected because the market would not bear one single more vampire book. The old monsters were dead, one editor told me. Since the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series is making the New York Times list on a fairly regular basis, that rejection amuses me now. It was not amusing at the time. Horror editors said the book wasn’t scary enough because my vamps are out of the closet, or coffin, as it were, and not a secret in Anita’s world. Mystery editors couldn’t swallow the monsters, no matter how strong the mystery.
We finally found a home at Ace, an imprint of Penguin Putnam, thanks to Ginjer Buchanan, a far-seeing editor, who has a real eye for new talent. I say that not just because she rescued Anita from the slush pile, but because she’s made a habit in her career