The Publishing Fight Club

When no is go

There are great days in a parent’s life and there are hard days.

I’m not sure which kind of day you would call the day in 1997 when your kid tells you they’re going to go to California to go to Los Angeles to get an MFA and try to write novels for a living at the moment when billions of dollars of internet wealth are being minted in the dot-com boom just up the coast in the Bay Area.

In 1999, I completed my MFA in creative writing at CalArts and finished my novel.

I went to Skylight Books on Vermont in Los Feliz and looked through the acknowledgements in books from my favorite authors to find the names of their agents.

If they have enough books, at some point they thank the agent.

I found the names.

I bought a box of paper and printed out the novel. It was 453 pages long.

I ran out of toner.

I bought more toner.

I wrote cover letters for each agent.

I bought boxes to hold the manuscripts and took them to the Post Office right across the street from Skylight and mailed them out.

Then I waited.

One of the agents I sent the book to was the agent of Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club.

Survivor is my favorite Chuck Palahniuk book. To me it’s better than Fight Club, which I also enjoyed, but didn’t think was as complex and fully realized as Survivor.

The agent read my book and liked it enough to ask for a meeting.

This is it, I thought. Everything is going to change.

The agent called and talked to me with great enthusiasm for an hour about what I wrote, its theoretical underpinnings and ideas I had for what was next.

It felt like a writing workshop, job interview, first date and strategic planning session.

It felt good.

I hoped he would sign me and we would sell the book.

He emailed me a week later and passed.

Then I got an enthusiastic email from an agent at a big name agency with a great roster, but who did not have a star as big as Chuck Palahniuk, then one of the most famous literary fiction writers in the world.

The conversation went much the same as the conversation with Chuck Palahniuk’s agent.

I got off the phone cautiously optimistic.

Not long after he emailed me to say he wanted to represent me.

Here we go.

He had suggestions for a rewrite that made sense.

I worked on the changes for four months, then we were ready.

The agent took the novel to an editor at Picador, an imprint that published many of my favorite authors at the time.

Things moved fast.

The editor loved the book and took it to the editorial board and recommended they buy it.

They didn’t buy it.

We went to other publishing houses and found more interest.

There was heat for a minute.

Then there was nothing.

No one bought the book.

I’m still writing.

No is not a stop sign.

No is the beginning of what’s next.

Life has a timeline.

You have your timeline.

Maybe they intersect.

Often they don’t.

Let go.