The Shelf
Where unpublished novels go to die.
Becoming a writer of fiction in 2008, at age 62, was a lifelong dream come true. Such joy! My goal was simple: Write a novel and get it published. And no self-publishing for me, thank you very much; only a traditional publisher would do.
For someone who’d been a successful teacher for forty years, how hard could that be? As I write this now, I imagine how the Gods of Writing looked down in pity and laughed their heads off at yet another delusional writer.
I immediately produced a doorstop of a tome that had been marinating for years: A Teacher’s Tale, an ode to teaching, which treats the reader to students bouncing off ceilings, parents eating the teacher for lunch, the department chair from hell, an X-rated Math Department love affair, a Satanic school board, and really good advice for teaching trigonometry. The novel had 200,000 glorious words, and after a few encounters with a merciless critique group, crash-landed on The Shelf.
My second novel was a traditional mystery, Uneasy Lies the Head. It features the department chair of an Ivy League university found dead at her desk with a bullet through her head. Imagine the piranha pool of academic sharks who hated her—the gnome-like Shakespearian scholar, the obsequious Victorianist, the vapid poet, the Nigerian prince—all being interrogated by an unhappy, menopausal White single-mother detective and her very green sidekick, who is half-Irish and half-African American.
I launched this exuberant mélange into the world of publishing at the Backspace Writers Conference in New York City, my entrée into the fantastical world of agents, real authors, and craft workshops, where I met an excited gaggle of writers just like myself—instant soul-mates—all of us clutching our little manuscripts close to our tender hearts.
Two agents requested my full manuscript! This was it! Could publication be far behind?
Additionally, I sent out 125 personalized query letters, and 25 agents requested some or all of my manuscript. Those were heady days. My happiness was a true gift, untarnished by cynicism or disillusionment. While I luxuriated in the delectable thought of agents fighting over my novel, the rejections trickled in. All 127 of them.
As I look back now, I marvel that every single agent I queried responded to my query—unheard of today. Some even gave me personal feedback. I gathered that the novel was basically entertaining, but not original enough. Too much similarity to all the other Agatha Christie wannabes. Unceremoniously, the mystery joined the teacher on The Shelf.
Write something different, my critics had said. I took the advice to heart and went over the top with book #3, Watching, which features a wacky performance artist, a creepy videographer, and a mysterious S&M establishment, The Chateau. Again, several agents requested the manuscript. At a fabulous conference, Killer Nashville, I read my first chapter aloud in a workshop, and landed an agent! An honest-to-goodness flesh-and-blood agent, who loved my weird novel with its naïve, spunky protagonist. My new agent sent me to heaven with her praise. I pinched myself. Here I was, living the dream.
Then we were on submission, this time being rejected at a higher level. My agent shared with me all the editors’ comments as they sent back the bad news. One rejection has stayed with me over the years: I can’t believe you sent me such a pile of crap (sic).
During the bleak winter that year, my agent slipped on some icy steps, tumbled down, and broke her back. Sadly, she quit being an agent, and I gave up on Watching.
Clunk, it went, third in line on The Shelf.
The fourth novel, Girl Misfired, is about a trans woman who kills someone in self-defense, and the detective who tracks her down.
“How awful you wrote that,” a friend of mine said. “You, of all people.” This novel had no takers, no agent, no responses to queries, not even rejections. It was custom-made for The Shelf.
Another year, another conference. 2019. The Writers’ Digest Conference in New York City. My fifth novel, The Lincoln Affair, is my favorite among my books. Set in Springfield, IL, it features a British expat, a forger, who is obsessed with Lincoln documents. During the course of the novel, he steals an original Lincoln letter from a woman by forging the document and replacing the original with the forgery. Then he falls madly in love with the woman.
Unfortunately, this novel, too, was destined for The Shelf; but it didn’t go without a fight. At Pitchfest, seven agents requested the full manuscript, and, after a few weeks, three explicitly rejected it. The others were never heard from again. (I know, tacky behavior from an agent, to request a manuscript at a conference, then ghost the author.)
The following year, I wrote my sixth novel, A Reluctant Spy. I attended a new conference (for me), Thrillerfest, held, thanks to Zoom, during the pandemic. Being online, Pitchfest was less fraught than its in-the-flesh counterpart. An author could buy seven minutes apiece with up to eight agents, first come first served. By that time, I’d become an Olympian athlete in the pitching game. Wish you could have seen my nimble fingers breaking records to grab eight slots with mystery/thriller agents.
I worked for hours polishing my pitch: On the day of her husband’s funeral, a young computer scientist, Madeline, is approached by an FBI agent, who persuades her to go undercover in the Computer Science Department to find out who’s providing encryption software to a pornography ring on the dark web. As Madeline delves into the computers of her colleagues, not only does she uncover her dead husband’s infidelity, she finds herself in escalating danger, fighting to outwit a wily antagonist who is luring her into a deadly game.
Yet again, I was almost pitch perfect, and seven agents requested my manuscript.
Unbelievably, my quest was successful! I received one of those magical phone calls that a writer dreams of, in which an agent raves about your novel and offers representation. I thought I’d die of happiness. This was finally it, I told myself, the real deal.
Oh, wait—did I mention that some of the dark-web activity in A Reluctant Spy involves juvenile pornography? Every editor that my agent submitted to told her definitively that no one wanted to read such dark fiction during the pandemic. All of them passed.
“Could you change the pornography to something else…like maybe online gambling?” my agent asked.
No, I could not. My desire to get published did not supersede my novel’s truth. Child pornography is out there. Amoral programmers enable it. Removing this theme wasn’t negotiable.
With sadness in my heart, I tenderly placed novel #6 on the groaning shelf. This one was tough to let go of.
“Why not write a sequel?” my agent suggested. “Same protagonist, but a safer topic.”
Slowly, however, I had begun to understand something about myself as a writer: I was not about finding safe topics. But I did write a sequel, in which my protagonist gets stalked by a dangerous predator: The Fourth Woman.
By now, my agent had lost interest, and we parted ways.
Fourteen years had somehow slipped by from those early, innocent times, and I was in a different place. I had gained some savvy as an author. You learn a thing or two if you wholeheartedly submerge yourself in this hardscrabble world of fiction publishing. I had, after all, written seven novels. I’d won and lost two agents. In a strange way, I knew the ropes. I had enough wisdom to understand that number one, I wasn’t Shakespeare, and number two, I’d been unlucky in the publishing game. It also dawned on me that I’d hidden my novels on some mythical shelf, which was inaccessible to the wide world of readers out there.
I knew in my marrow that the time had come to change the algorithm. No more rinse and repeat.
I did not try to find an agent for novel #7. Gently, I dislodged A Reluctant Spy, book #6, from The Shelf and dusted it off. Polished it up. Then submitted it to some small independent publishers. I resolved that if this didn’t work, I’d self-publish my spy novel, and then, a few months later, I’d self-publish book #7, the sequel. My long futile wait was heading to a close. We all are, to a large extent, manipulators of our own fates.
The first small publisher I approached accepted A Reluctant Spy! He asked to read the sequel. He and his editor gobbled it down within a week and agreed to publish The Fourth Woman too.
It was like hearing the Great Gods of Publishing saying, OK, fine. You’ve put in your time and deserve a break.
A Reluctant Spy is due out in October, 2024.
The Fourth Woman is set to follow in June, 2025.
I no longer speak in certainties. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Books 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 will be taken off The Shelf, then spruced up and reconsidered by me through newly-wise eyes. Each novel was forged in the furnace of my head, and deserves to rise, if only briefly, from the ashes.
The Shelf is history.