I'm taking one more stab at jumping into the world of published novelists. I shipped "Small Town News' to another publisher last week.
It's not as if it has been turned down by a bunch of publishers. The entire manuscript has been rejected two times, while a host of publishers have rejected my queries and wouldn't even let me send the manuscript.
I finished writing "Small Town News' at about the end of July of 2002. I send out several letters and e-mails to a number of publishers at that time. With everything I was involved in when school started, I didn't push it much, though I did send out a letter or two during the 2002-2003 school year.
I had fully intended to go on a marketing blitz in the summer of 2003, but most of that summer was spent trying to hold on to my teaching position in the Diamond R-4 School District, then landing another teaching position in the Joplin R-8 School District.
"Small Town News" was the first novel I had attempted since 1979. A quarter of a century wasted, or at least I thought it was...at least as far as my writing was concerned. When you're spending your time writing more than 20,000 articles for a number of southwest Missouri newspapers, you don't have much time for writing novels.
I wrote my first novel when I was 14 years old. I was a freshman at East Newton High School. The novel was 289 pages and it was terrible. I sent "A Song For Susan" out to a number of publishers, but it came nowhere near to being publishable or even salvageable. Unfortunately, I can only find one page from that novel. I don't believe it exists any more. It was terrible, but I sure wish I still had it.
I tried my hand at two or three other novels during my high school years. I still have all of them, but none of them were very good. I wrote a decent one when I was in college, a murder mystery called "Stranglehold," which I keep thinking about rewriting. Maybe I will someday.
The last time I wrote a novel before "Small Town News" was when I was the editor of the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald, a weekly newspaper with its main office in Lockwood.
The 10 months I lived in Lockwood was one of the most enjoyable times of my life. Not only did I enjoy the newspaper work, but I loved the small-town atmosphere of Lockwood. I loved the barbecued beef sandwiches and the foot-long hot dogs at the C&J Drive-In. After the paper was published on Wednesday, I would stay up until 1:45 a.m. on Thursday mornings every week and watch reruns of Mission Impossible on Channel 27.
After I finished working every night, I would sit in front of the Luminary-Herald office and pound out the novel, "Sudden Death," another murder mystery, on an old Underwood manual typewriter. During the summer, I umpired several games for the Lockwood Little League, so I would head back to the office when I was finished and type until eleven or midnight.
Probably the worst night of my young life to that point came in early October when the paper's publisher, Tommy Wilson, came to Lockwood from the home office in Lamar and told us that the edition of the Luminary-Herald we were working on would be the last one. He turned to our advertising saleswoman, Donna Shaw, and said, "Donna, we're going to take you to Lamar with us." Then he turned to me and said, "Randy...we're not taking you." That turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me since I went back to college and earned my teaching degree, but it sure didn't seem like a good thing at the time. I loved making $180 a week as the editor of the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald.
I had finished writing "Sudden Death" just a few days before the demise of the Luminary-Herald. I reworked it over the next several months. It is another work I would like to rewrite sometime in the future.
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Natural Disaster's return Saturday night was something less than triumphant. The audience liked us, but it was probably the worst performance we have ever given. Our bass player, Tim Brazelton, was in Kansas City attending his girlfriend's daughter's wedding, so our lead guitarist, Richard Taylor, was playing bass, and our rhythm guitarist, Mark McClintock, was playing lead. We were totally confused.
My singing was okay, except on "Suspicion," a song I have been singing since it first came out 40 years ago. I actually forgot a line in the second verse and mumbled my way through it.
Still, the audience seemed to like it. It was good to see some familiar faces in the audience. And it was mainly good to be performing again.
I was the last member of the group to show up for a concert at a motorcycle shop near Boulder City earlier in the day Saturday. However, despite being the last one, I was still a month early. Richard got the date wrong so we all showed up quite a bit ahead of time. Our old classmate, Paul Richardson, who owns the motorcycle shop, found it quite amusing.
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I finished up my last Joplin R-8 work of the summer on Thursday, when I attended the final day of the Joplin R-8 Technology Leadership Academy. We finished our I-movies and gave an overall evaluation of the academy. Each academy member will receive a laptop computer sometime in July. That will be nice. Plus, we each received $350 ($17.50 an hour) for attending. That was included on our paychecks Friday.
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In addition to my writing and performing, I am trying to get caught up on my reading and catching a few movies on VCR. The last book I read was "The Last Editor" by James Bellows, who told about his times as editor of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the New York Herald-Tribune and the Washington Star. All of those papers went out of business, but Bellows was known for taking dying newspapers, livening them up, and making his competitors (such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post) more interesting. Among the writers he put on the map were Tom Wolfe, the late Dick Schaap, and Jimmy Breslin.
The next book I am going to read is the autobiography of Constance Baker Motley, a black lawyer who helped James Meredith get enrolled in the University of Mississippi as the first black student, and who also worked on Brown vs. Board of Education.
On the movie front, when I finish with this blog entry, I am going to watch one, though I haven't quite decided which one to watch.