Getting my First Agent

I had been working a real job that took all my time and I felt my literary career slipping further and further away from any sort of reality. I was at a crossroads when I decided I had to do something or I would lose sight of my dream of being a novelist altogether. I had written several novels that continued to gather rejection letters from publishing houses and I became convinced my problem was that I didn't have an agent. I had sent my partials to many agents and received the same rejection letters that publishers were sending with just a different letter head. But sending out more manuscripts seemed futile. Somehow I had to break through the wall of New York publishing. There was only one thing to do, go to New York.

I arranged to stay with a friend in Brooklyn and gave myself two weeks. It was my vacation time and so I went to New York in the beginning of December. I brought forty partials of my two novels and and my thick WRITERS MARKET listing all the agents. I flew in and settled myself in my friends apartment and readied my attack. The next morning I took the subway into Manhattan. The day was cold and overcast. I got off the subway in lower Manhattan and began to walk with my heavy backpack. I went to the first address I had pulled out of WRITERS MARKET. A very harassed man answered the door in a small office. I explained who I was and handed him partials of my manuscript. He stared down at the pages like something strange and foreign. Well I've never had anyone come too my door and hand me a manuscript he said, staring at me.  He shrugged. Thank you. I'll look at it.

This then was my plan. To drop off my partial manuscripts and synopsis all over Manhattan. To literally walk to every agent I could find. That first day I hit ten agents and returned to Brooklyn with blisters on my ankles. The second day I headed out in tennis shoes and worked my way into Mid Town. The agents were in small office, large offices, apartments, high rises, bungalows, basement apartments. Some of them were nice and invited me in. Most of the agents just took my manuscripts and smiled for the doomed. One harassed man in a small office overflowing with manuscripts cried out, this isn't done this way. Another agent sold me a book he had written. Another agent working out of his apartment said he was getting out of the business because fiction was too hard to sell.

I ran out of manuscripts on the third day and ran off forty more copies. At the end of two weeks I had hit every agent I could find and had no more manuscripts. I flew back to Chicago to wait for the fruit of my labor. Kind letters came back from the big apple and silence. I never did get an agent from that trip to New York, but a month later I quit my job and started writing full time. I landed an agent later that year. He was one of the ones I had missed.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Kindle Download of Rocket Man

"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo’s Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." - Chicago Sun Times

Writer in Residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation William Hazelgrove's third novel is "a charming tale of fatherhood, family, and the American Dream." (Midwest Book Review).

"This critically insightful diatribe against conformity is recommended." - Library Journal

Getting Hemingway's Bed

He did sleep. Between hunting big game and fishing for swordfish and fighting in the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, WWII,  bullfighting and boxing and writing brilliant novels and winning Pulitzers and Nobel prizes and going through four wives and three homes and doing just about everything a writer can do to make a name of himself and still be taken seriously, after all that he did sleep. In a bed. I had walked past the room he had been born in a hundred times on my way to the attic. That room still held me in awe, but the more terrestrial part of his life, the one of waking up in a bed like anyone else intrigued me. That's why I said I would get his bed.

The Hemingway Foundation needed someone to drive up to Petsosky Michigan to get his boyhood bed. I voluteered. Why not? Petosky figured into many Hemingway stories and I wanted to see the cottage so central to his earlier stories. But more it seemed like I could get a little closer to the man. A bed is fairly personal and I thought bringing the bed back with me would give me more insight into the writer, the man, and might just be a great adventure. Of course it was during January and the biggest snow of the year. But who cares. Hemingway wouldn't have batted an eye.

So I headed up in my Ford for Petosky to the home of his great nephew who had the bed in a  storage shed. The trip up was long and lonely and snowy. But I hummed on the adrenalin of my mission. It was right in there with driving to New York to stomp around and look for agents. It ranked up there with getting my first novel published by a man who had never pulblished anything. It ranked right up there with deciding to write fiction when everyone I knew was taking a real job. It certainly ranked up there with the day I went up to his attic.

So I met his nephew. Jim. He was a nice man with a contagious smile. We made small talk and then he showed me the storage shed that contained the bed. We dug out the bed from under a bunch of junk. The springs were rusted and the white paint had flaked off. But it was his bed, his nephew assured me with a chuckle. One of the spindles fell off and I put it in my pocket as we loaded the bed in my Explorer. The great nephew bid me farewell and I headed back for Oak Park.

Writers like to embellish. If you were Hemingway you embellished like a God. But I really did run into a blizzard. The Midwest was hit with the worst snow storm in twenty years. The highway literally disappeared. I crept along with my strange cargo until I was forced off into a parking lot where a lone bar light burned through the whiteout conditions. I left my car and went into the bar to find other stranded travelers. Suddenly we became a club and we passed the night drinking and telling out stories. I said I was a writer and that I was bringing Ernest Hemingway's bed back from Petosky. People politely nodded and smiled and moved away.

The storm lifted and I got back on the road at dawn. I drove into Oak Park late in the afternoon and unloaded the bed in the Hemingway house where the Foundation repainted it and put a new mattress on and made it up like Ernest had just slept there. I'd like to say I glimmered something about the man from his bed or that my quest to bring the bed back gave me an idea of what he had gone through in some of his adventurers. But in the end it turned out to be just some rusted old steel springs and peeling wood that I brought back from a storage shed in the middle of nowhere. In that way, it was very Hemingway.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

When you know you have to leave your writing group

You come into your writing group full of great intentions and are delighted to find kindred souls, people who do this brain cracking work of writing and for a long time you glide along with your fellow scribes. You look forward to reading your work and getting the feedback and now you have a thick skin and are able to ferret out the good criticism from the bad and you all sort of move along at the same pace and then suddenly like high school, you graduate...you get published.

For me it wasn't such a draconian moment. My publisher was tiny and in Chicago. Still, I brought the galleys with me and showed them around and it was then I felt a sea change. Everyone nodded and murmured congratulations and then the group fell into its old routine. I was in the middle of editing the galleys so I hadn't really written anything new and  I read some of the novel.  The comments were muted, some were complimentary, but I felt I had brought a gun to a knife fight.

So I took a few weeks off and worked on my galleys. When I returned I was exhausted and hollow eyed  and only had my novel to read again. I sat and listened to the same works in progress, the bits of poetry, short stories, fragments of novels, then it came to Robert's piece. Robert wrote non fiction for a small magazine in the city. He tried to write fiction but it never worked. For years we had listened to Robert read these words that were like boxcars in a line but there was no ignition. We had all been in a secret conspiracy with Robert, who was a very nice guy, to give him a pass and not really criticize his work.

But this time I felt we were doing Robert a huge disservice. For two years I had been listening to Robert's bad fiction and for two years I had said nothing. He was a lifer. They existed in groups. People who came for the social aspect as much as the writing. And so you laid off. But l had changed. Something about working on those galleys with an editor had pushed me to the next level and I couldn't go back. So when it came to me, I blasphemed. I commented on Roberts work.

We are doing Robert a big disservice here. I looked around at the group. We haven't been honest with him...I paused. We haven't told him his fiction doesn't work. Someone dropped a pen. Someone coughed. I have violated a group taboo. A little man named Pee Wee who was also a lifer piped up. You have no right to judge Roberts fiction that way. I looked at him. Are you kidding? That's why we are here. No, Pee Wee persisted. You are assuming you know good fiction and Robert doesn't and you have no right to tell him he doesn't know how to write fiction.

And it was then I knew I was done. The group that I had been so much a part of for years was suddenly irrelevant. I couldn't stay if  I wanted too. So I sat through the rest of the readings and said nothing. There was no point. I never went back. It was much later I realized my crime wasn't that I had criticized Robert's writing, it was actually something much deeper and much more serious-- I had stumbled into becoming  a professional.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall.

The Novel as Social Commentary

I think it was Gore Vidal who proclaimed the novel dead. He said it was dead as a form of relevant social commentary and that responsibility had been passed on to film. He and others felt that the form wasn't relevant enough, that it could not take on the fast changing stream of the world today. Muted in its form and stuck in it's history, how could  a  novel take on what changes in a nanosecond today? Only the Internet can give us our up to the minute interpretation of the world as we want it. Right?

This was Tom Wolfe's complaint. That nobody writes about today, the big novel of social relevancy. Well maybe. Film is a more flexible medium. It would seem novelist need more time to put the world in order and then spit it back. Franzen's Freedom is a record of America that has already passed is one example.The world he gives back to us is a few years back. I am still working through the book so I can not speak to how much of our world he captures, but safe to say he will not be commenting on the Chilean miners being brought to the surface or Christine O'Donnell.

But of course this brings up the role of the novel. It is not the Internet, it is not film. For the novel to succeed it has to have staying power and say something timeless about an era, a moment, a movement in history. The Great Gatsby is great not because of it's moment of twenties bacchanalia ,but because Fitzgerald pegged something about the dark side of the American dream. Maybe he just pegged something about America. And that story stands in history as a moment that is not tied to any moment.

So I think the great social novel is alive and well. It may not reflect back to us what we want at that moment, but for someone else, it might just give them a glimpse of the hell and the heaven we went through in a frozen moment of time. In that way it might be our last chance to see who we really are.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall.
www.billhazelgrove.com

Rest in Peace Holden--Review of Catcher in the Rye

It seems a lot of high schools are no longer using A Catcher in the Rye in their curriculum.You cannot be an American writer and not come to grips with "A Catcher in the Rye." The quintessential first person coming of age changed the bar for all writers when it's laconic wise guy narrator took the field and offended our sensibilities. He hated everyone and most of all himself. From then on whenever a first person novel came out with attitude the comparison to Holden Caulfield was inevitable.When my first novel Ripples appeared United Press International compared it to a Catcher in the Rye. I was ecstatic, then I noticed how many first novels were compared to this rock of contemporary literature.

If one had a first person narrator that threw off on institutions and people then there was a good chance this comparison would sneak in. Still, any writer who has read A Catcher in the Rye knows that there can be no real comparison to this novel because it really was a one of a kind.On the outside Holden seems offensive enough, but it is self knowledge that gets in the way of just another snotty spoiled rich kid. He wants sanity and he wants meaning, but in the world of 1950s New York between the hookers and the bars and his absent parents he can find only loneliness.

There in lies Holden's urban parable...the cold world of the young urban sophisticate looking for the answers. He after all only wants to be the Catcher in the Rye and catch the children. And of course the person he really wants to catch is himself. Rest in peace Holden.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel, Rocket Man, is due out in the fall
www.billhazelgrove.com

Writer Cars

Now the writers car should have no payment. This is a must. This prevents the writers car from being snatched when times get hard. A constant condition. So the writers car should be over ten years old with a good 150k on the odometer. This will allow the writer to bargain hard by pointing out the mileage and the fact the car is a gas hog (old Explorers and trucks are excellent writer cars because no one wants them) If you can get a smaller car then so much the better, but most writers end up with a lot old lead sleds.  Under no circumstances do you wash the writer car inside or out. This allows you to save boat loads of money and makes you less conspicuous in bad neighborhoods.

So now you have the writer car and you have to fill it. There should be overdue books from the library floating around the back seat or on the floor. These can be current or obscure novels that the library desperately wants back and the writer just can't seem to get them out of his car. Along with these old books are notes for future books, notebooks from old books, a collection of CDs  that still play with an amazing amount of scratches led off by the Best of George Thorogood that amazingly seems to play no many how many times it travels around the car as an errant flying saucer.

Coffee cups should abound in the console of the writer car firmly adhered into their cup holders, welded tightly since just after 9/11 when you anxiously drank from your mug while listening to hours of NPR. For some reason taking the writer mug out of the writer car seems just too hard and so it has become part of the writer car. Now there should be many wrappers from fast food with french fries that amazingly never decay. If you ever doubt there are chemicals in french fries, leave one in your car for several seasons and after being baked and frozen you will be amazed to find it looks exactly the same.

Finally, there should be books hidden under the seats. Maybe a dog eared copy of Catcher in the Rye or a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace. Anything that you can grab while going into coffee houses all over America. Having these books firmly wedged under the seat allows you never to be caught without reading material. The beauty of the writers car is that it is totally expendable. If Floyd or Hank deems you needing a new transmission or engine, then you can just leave the writer car (just be sure to take all your books and old fries, you never know) and then walk on and go find another one. Get on the Internet and find another one. Craig's list is heavy with writer cars.

William Hazelgrove latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Writers Never Retire

Retirement. Where does that come from? Some sort of hangover from the World War II generation. Certainly the people who grew up in the last Great Depression never thought about retirement. Something companies and stock brokers came up with so people would invest their money. Whole generations working based on the dream or the promise that one day they could hang it up like Mr. Jet Blue and just say screw it, I'm done and now I am going to kick back. Asta La Vista baby. Then again, maybe not.

New York Times says people are really frightened now they won't be able to retire. The massive unemployment is draining savings and 401Ks and the houses aren't worth half their value anymore and the stock market crashed. Bottom line, people who assumed they were going to retire are thinking they may work until the day they die. Grim reality and very frightening for many, but for writers, it is something we have always known, because writers never retire.

It is write until you drop. That is the writer credo, if there is one. Once you commit to the road of the writer then security goes right out the window. You make peace early on with the fact you will never retire, in fact you don't even recognize the concept. What? Sit around and do nothing? If retirement is doing what you want then writers are already retired. The road of the writer is constant struggle. And if you aren't down with that in the beginning then pick something else.

So in a way the writer is recession proof. No one becomes a writer because they crave financial security. They crave something else. A walk on the wild side, a life less certain perhaps. But the promise of a nirvana at the end of years and years of writing. I don't think so. The only promise for the writer is that he will get up the next morning, sit down, and begin again.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out this month.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Banned Books

Just read a list of banned books in schools and libraries. To Kill A Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, Grapes of Wrath, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Sun Also Rises....the jury is just warming up. The reasons for banning books is varied. Under the too political category we find, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Animal Farm, 1984. Under too much sex we find Tropic of Cancer, The Sun Also Rises, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, Beloved, Jaws, Lolita. Under Irreligious we find The Lord of the Rings, Last Temptation of Christ. Socially offensive is: Anne Frank, Of Mice and Men, Catch 22, A Clockwork Orange, James and the Giant Peach.

Well, we could go on and on because the list goes on and on. These are books banned by schools and libraries in the United States. In the United States. Let me say that again. In the United States. A woman who read this list came up to me and said how can they do this. I sputtered along about extremists and the right and Christian Coalition but she bought none of it. And I suppose she is right. The reason goes deeper than that.

Somewhere we forgot about literature. The role of literature, of art is to illuminate. Good fiction should tell a truth that does push an agenda. It should not bend to our time. But we live in the age of the Internet where everything bends to our time. We live in age where if thy channel offends thee switch it. We watch different news so we can hear what we want to hear. If thine eye offends thee find another blogger. Literature is a maddening piece of stone. It just sits there and tells its story and it is immutable. We may not like the narrator of Huckleberry Finn and his politically incorrect use of the N word but the book doesn't care. The work belongs to the ages and cares not for ours.

So we ban them. We really dont' want to hear contrary views anymore. We don't have to. Just a couple clicks away on the cable diorama and there is our channel. Our view. But those damn books. They just tell their story and we find them morally offensive, socially offensive, sexually offensive, and irreligious. And the worst thing is you can't switch the channel! So ban them. That will show those bastards.

William Hazelgrove' latest novel is Rocket Man due out in September
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Novelist on Time Magazine

Jonathan Franzen is on the cover of Time Magazine for his new novel Freedom. Time is thin gruel for news now but a novelist making it on the cover of any magazine is something to note. Rock stars, politicians, tyrants, terrorists...they have all been there but few writers. Franzen looks like a writer with a stubble and glasses and some kind of strange toning that makes it look like he just might be animated.

That Time decided to put a novelist on the front and declared him the next...what? Voice of all mankind, his generation...a strange bird still at large during the Internet...a literary writer, is very encouraging to all writers. Sure, everyone wants to be on the cover of a magazine but writers get such little play that it is good someone in the editorial offices of Time  took a flyer on that art of old...the fiction writer who might just put substance before money. It did stand out as something different.

The dentists office I discovered this magazine in was plastered in tabloid fair and wannabe People magazine ripoffs. I was alone in my reading of Franzen's life as a bird watcher, his lifestyle between New York and San Diego something to envy, and of course his new novel. They even broke out writers into three categories, literary guard, contemporary novelists (Franzen and a few others) and then the up and coming young Turks. The decisions on these writers is not necessarily books sales which makes it more interesting. Time previewed Franzen on the cover as saying he is not a rich writer. Or the richest. This alone would buck the trend of magazine covers. Superlatives aside, richest in America is usually game over. Most famous for whatever reason including quitting your airline job might be cause for getting on a cover. But to write a literary novel that does well and might sum up our time...well, that usually is found in Publishers Weekly or the New York Times book review.

So maybe it is the fact that Time magazine is on life support they decided to throw one for the gipper. Maybe Franzen really is a breed alone that deserves to be on the cover of Time. He did dish Oprah and sold even more books because of it. But then again, maybe someone, occasionally, puts art over commerce, and we see a man with a stubble and glasses, looking like, well, a writer.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Cyber Author

There just isn't enough time in the day. Not if you have a new book out. Used to be you would do a few signings and some radio interviews, maybe a little television. Not exactly a leisure pace, but you felt like marketing a book had some tempo, some sense of progression. Now there is just not enough time in the day. The online beast of publishing has reared it's head and will not go away. And he is never satisfied. Start your day at six AM. Start with your blog. I am the Editor in Chief for Speak Without Interruption http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/ and I am a National Examiner writer on National Culture http://www.nationalexaminer.com/ and I write my own column http://www.williamhazelgrove.blogspot.com/ called The View From Hemingway's Attic. This takes about two hours and then I have to get twittering. This is sending out bits of information for my twitter followers. Now we are almost four hours in and I had just finished the first wave of writing and twittering.But it is time to do a podcast of my latest essay. This takes another half hour. Now it it time to return emails. This takes another thirty minutes. Now it is time to consider bloggers who will review my new book. It is noon.
The feeling of never being able to get it all done is omnipresent. There are so many ways to go for the modern cyber author that it can just stop you from doing anything. It is a lot like being at the crossroads of a highway with ten different options. You could concentrate on getting reviews from the thousands of book bloggers. This alone could burn up your entire day. How about linking your website with other websites? Another time burner that could easily cost you hours. Of course you could look toward mainstream media and concentrate on sending books to the newspapers or television shows. Or you could get into Search Engine Optimization and spend your day bookmarking your blogs and sites and trying to determine what keywords will bring you the most traffic. Don't even think of going on Facebook or Myspace. There is the potential to get sidetracked into social networking and nothing will get accomplished.
This is something new and no one really knows what the result will be. It is all too new. We all hear of the books that become bestsellers because of bloggers picking a book and it takes off like a rocket. When my novel, Rocket Man came out I envisioned the cyber world getting behind me in exactly this way. It has worked for me, but I didn't figure on the days without end where you could literally be online twenty four seven and still not get it all done. I just hope there will be an end of some sort soon. This has been going on for six months and some day I will have to start writing again.
William Elliott Hazelgrove's new novel, Rocket Man was just published by Pantonne Press and chosen as the Best Book of 2008. http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

http://www.pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

The Citizen Reviewer

How many people read the New York Times Book Review? Raise your hands. Hmmm...small crowd. How many people go and buy the books after reading a NYT Book Review? Extremely small crowd. My novel was reviewed in the New York Times and I did regard it as a benchmark, a status symbol of the novelist finally arrived. I do read the New York Times Book Review. Religiously. Every Sunday. But I must confess to a feeling akin to reading short stories in The Saturday Evening Post and that is I am reading something that belongs to a different time. The books reviewed are of a certain staple: fiction, international fiction with protagonists who overcome incredible odds in war torn regions. Biographies of long lost literary figures or Teddy Roosevelt. Alec Baldwin's diatribe on his divorce. Up and coming novelists on the back pages. Literary lions no one has heard of outside the literary lion circles. Historical fiction. Not that this is bad content....but it is no secret that book sections in the major newspapers are vanishing. The Chicago Tribune's book section was marginalized to the Saturday edition. The Washington Post Book World was practically eliminated. The New York Times Book Review is one of the last holdouts and thank God for that. So, the question is where are people going to find out about books now? An answer might be they are going nowhere to find out about books. Or we might believe what Steven Jobs said who proclaimed no one reads anymore--a self serving observation from Mr. IPOD. But the fact is people are still reading and reading a lot. I know. I have been to land over the rainbow and it is a bit like OZ. Strange new munchkins called Citizen Reviewers are reading and writing the reviews in cyber land and this is what people are reading. It is not only the big Book Blog sites that are claiming the attention of the reader, it is the ordinary posts of the ordinary reader. If books are still sold in the fundamental way of word of mouth then it makes perfect sense that the middleman paid reviewer would become antiquated in age of the Internet. We now have the direct links for readers to click on to find out to what the most relevant class of reviewers think--other readers. The obvious site for this well of reviews is Amazon.com where readers post directly to the book they just read. A book with fifty some reviews will give the reader a more balanced view of a book then the opinion of one Ivory Tower reader. Consensus is the word of the day in cyberland. Other sites like Library Thing, Shelfari, Goodreaders all work off consensus reviews. A hundred people read a book and rate it and then you get an average. The fringe reviewer who doesn't like anything and the over the top reviewer who loves everything are marginalized by a healthy discerning middle. No one is getting paid and yes you will have the author friends and enemies weighing in, but in there also will be people with honest opinions. The result is much more democratic and that makes sense in a democracy. Art by the people and for the people and reviewed by the people. It doesn't matter really if we like it or not because it is here. The argument for a paid reviewer is one that he or she is trained to review. Maybe. But don't you get a skewed viewpoint by a single rarefied person reading books they prefer? Getting through the literary gates of most heavy hitter review publications is reserved for those who catch an editors whim who is literally deluged with books. We can't expect a fair and judicial process from harried overworked reviewers or editors who have even less staff today. So, by default, we end up with a polyglot of books being reviewed by a polyglot of readers. The New York Times Book Review will always be the benchmark for the literary world and I think that is a good thing. But the Citizen Reviewer will certainly be a second opinion...something everyone should have.