BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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There were about 40 of us in Pitt’s writing program, some focused on journalism, some on creative writing. We all hung out together, drank together, and worked together on the school newspaper, The Pitt News.
All of our writing buddies hung out at 113 Chesterfield. There was lots of beer and smoking. The place stunk. It hosted all-night arguments about most anything—the Kinks vs the Beatles, Herman Hesse vs Richard Brautigan, the Steelers, Pirates, and Tony Dorsett.
There was a klepto among us. Stuff disappeared, including my blue-and-white letterman’s jacket (track-and-field, I ran the two-mile) with my initials sewn across the left chest. Damn it! I loved that jacket.
My writing buddies amazed me. We'd be assigned to write 800 words about such and such. And the next day they'd come back with 800 words arranged as never before. When that writing made me smile, or think, or feel, it was as if my buddies performed magic.
Freeman was the best of the crew. We were once assigned to write a scene two different ways. One with narrative and dialog, the other dialog-only. Freeman titled his assignment, “The Happy Mechanic.” The narrative-and-dialog version was about a guy working on his car’s engine. When the narrative was removed, so that only the dialog was left, it was a sex scene. The professor and class loved it. Brilliant.
But hold on! Better yet, what everybody missed (Freeman pointed it out to me later) was that in the narrative version of his story, the second word in each sentence also told a story. I don’t remember Freeman’s version, but imagine something like this:
You had to love Freeman.
It was obvious that all my fellow students could write far better than me. Which was a frightening reality. Pitt graduated about 40 writers a year. There were 200 similar writing programs around the country. Which meant that 8,000 writers entered the market annually. In four years, I’d be 32,000th in line.
I was so screwed.
But hey, if I couldn't be the writer, maybe I could be the person who connects good writers with readers. That way, people could enjoy that “magic” like I did whenever a buddy wrote something amazing.
That connective person seemed to be what they called a “publisher.” So at that moment, I decided to become a publisher.
The publisher thing worked. Wonderfully so. I had a lot of fun, met good people, traveled much of the world, and got paid enough. And in the halls of a New York publisher, I bumped into the love of my life.
Tomorrow: Matt and I end up in Boston