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Author Don Evans recently joined the Chicago Writers Association. His first novel, Good Money After Bad, was published a month or so ago by Atomic Quill Press (Detroit). It’s a book about a sports gambler who funds his losses by submitting himself as a human guinea pig to increasingly dangerous medical studies. In his introduction to CWA he wrote that while his agent was shopping his first novel that he had written THREE MORE BOOKS!

I asked myself, “What’s up with that agent? How typical an experience was that?” I didn’t have any answers, so I decided to ask Don, “How did you find your agent? Are you currently with an agent? Do you think agents are necessary?” This is his response:

I’d studied under Tobias Wolff at Syracuse University, and he liked me and liked my work. I’d worked on a linked story collection as my graduate thesis, but had plans, like most MFA students, to turn my attention to a novel. Toby told me to send him the book when I’d finished. I did. He made some editorial suggestions (the best input I received from anybody), and after reading the revision advised me to send it to his agent, Amanda Urban, at International Creative Management.

Soon after, I got a phone call from Richard Abate, who was a more junior agent to whom “Binky” had passed along the manuscript, and he said he wanted to represent me. So Toby’s recommendation helped elevate my submission from slush pile sifters to decision makers, and Richard apparently thought the book would be a success.

It was the only agent to whom I’d sent the book, and I knew this was lucky, and I thought this assured success. When Richard confided that he thought Warner Books was going to make an offer, it seemed all that was true. But Colin Fox, the editor there who wanted to buy the book, could not get his colleagues (mostly female editors whom thought of Good Money After Bad as a “male book”) to agree, even after I’d completed non-contractual rewrite.

There were lots of other flattering rejections, but no buyers, and at some point Richard had made all the obvious contacts, and then some. I showed Richard Surrender Dorothy, but he thought the objections would be the same — here we had a male romance writer instead of a sports gambler, but either way he felt acquisition editors would say there was no obvious audience for the book.

Richard seemed to believe I had the talent to be a big success — meaning an author with big publishing contracts — but he suggested I redirect my career. Mysteries. He said I could be the Dennis Lehane or George Pelecanos of Chicago. I love the mystery genre; I have great respect for great mystery writers; I may even one day write a mystery. But I didn’t ever seriously consider changing my focus to fit an agent. I eventually met my publisher in a bar, which just confirms that one should spend more time drinking and less time writing cover letters.

Richard and I split amicably, and I’ve yet to begin the search for a replacement. I’m hoping Good Money After Bad will succeed in ways that will strengthen my position as I embark on that witch-hunt.

I think agents are necessary — that is, if you hope to attract a major publisher for your novel. Warner Books, for example, would never read an unsolicited manuscript. None of the big players will.

For a small press, though, agents are not only unnecessary but also impractical. Agents take a percentage of your advance money and royalties, which at a small press is, approximately, nothing. So an agent would never have spent the postage to pitch the book to Atomic Quill Press. A small press book, for the author, is nearly always an unprofitable affair, and often a losing proposition. I’m talking strictly of money here. There are, of course, lots of residual benefits to publication, most notably credibility, which can help you publish future works and get a better teaching job. But no money.

Advice? Everything I could say is anecdotal. My own experience in trying to find an agent is so limited as to be almost useless. But clearly, as with publishing stories, it’s extremely helpful to get out of the slush pile.

Relatively low paid readers (interns, sometimes) sift through the slush pile, rejecting the vast majority of the submissions. Those that get handed up must, I’m told, win over several more tiers of readers before ever getting to that person who can say, “Yes.”

So starting at the slush pile is tantamount to cruising a bar and trying to get one, then another, then another, then another, still another, woman to fall in love with you. Try, if at all possible, to weasel your manuscript into the hands of somebody with influence. At that point, you’ll only have to convince or fool one person to take a chance.

Which brings me to my publicist…

I’d witnessed several friends go through the small press experience. Otter Press published Richard Lange’s wonderful coming-of-age novel Fox Run, and Carnegie Mellon University Press published Diana Joseph’s beautiful and funny short story collection Happy Or Otherwise. Both writers worked like hell to get recognition, but were, I think, disenchanted at how little publisher support there was for their projects. There are many other examples like that.

For an author, this first novel means everything, but however much that small press might love the book they’re not going to stretch their very limited resources too far to promote it. Many small presses are not even equipped to do so, or are not good at it.

I knew I would spend some money, as well as time, to boost my novel’s chances, but I didn’t honestly think I could afford a publicist. I didn’t even know how to find a publicist or how useful that would be, compared to, say, pitching media outlets myself.

Gina Frangello and Melissa Fratterigo were appearing together at the 57th Street Books in Hyde Park. Melissa’s The Longest Pregnancy is an innovative and interesting story collection, and Gina’s My Sister’s Continent a bold, well-crafted novel. Both first books.

I’d been impressed with how much attention Gina’s book had received, and how professional Melissa’s Web site looked. (I didn’t know much more about Melissa at that point; I was there to support Gina.)

Sheryl Johnston had represented them both. Gina gave me her business card, and soon after I met Sheryl in Wicker Park for tea. Sheryl charges $50 per hour. She presented a few different packages that started at an investment of $500 and went up to around $3,000. (These, I must note, are not fixed rates, and Sheryl is very selective about whom she will take on as a client.)

Sheryl is an absolute dream. She’s hard working, smart, kind, well-respected, well-connected, and tough. She cares about her authors. I’ve spent about $2,500 and hope to keep her on retainer for as long as I have books to sell.

Sheryl was responsible for a major review in Booklist, feature stories in The Reader, Chicago Tribune, Pioneer Press, Elgin Courier, Wednesday Journal, Glen Ellyn Sun, and other newspapers I can’t remember right now, as well as radio interviews on Rick Kogan’s Sunday Papers (WGN) and Chicago Public Radio’s 848.

What’s most impressive is how shrewd she’s been at matching my sensibilities with those of journalists. (I’ve met several whom I not only liked immediately, but also came to respect for their talent. Jeff Felshman of The Reader and Mike Danahey of the Elgin Courier, not to mention Rick Kogan, whom I think of as a Chicago literary hero in the mold of Royko, are guys I hope I get to hang out with, regardless of anything else).

I think Sheryl has been more than worth the investment, not so much from a financial return (the verdict is still out on that) but from a credibility standpoint. I think my novel is being taken seriously because of Sheryl’s stellar work. I might have gotten some local press without Sheryl, but certainly not the review or the major feature stories. And with each positive mention, I pick up potential champions for the book and more easily convince other potentially influential journalists and writers to do something that might help.

As an example, I am booked to take part in a monthly reading series in New York City on June 5, along with Rick Reilly, who is an immensely popular and highly respected sports journalist. The director of that reading series immediately agreed to include me, and I seriously doubt it would have been that easy had he not been presented with the reviews and features that showed this was a book worth considering, despite its otherwise flimsy credentials as a small novel from an obscure press. (Early on, before Sheryl’s work had come to fruition, bookstores would immediately want to know if this was a self-published book, hinting that if it was, sorry, but they couldn’t invite me to appear there). All that said, I think I was extremely lucky to find Sheryl and can only guess that the wrong publicist might merely waste your money.

Surrender Dorothy

I spent three years in central New York, while doing graduate studies at Syracuse University, and had several times visited the nearby town Chittenango Falls. It’s a town of less than 5,000 people with a beautiful 167-foot waterfall, but it prides itself mostly on the fact that Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz series, was born there.

Baum’s family moved when he was five and there’s no evidence to suggest he had any special affection for the place, but all the same there’s an annual parade featuring many of the surviving Munchkins from the original film. The Munchkins are imported to town to ride in the parade and do public appearances around town, and are sponsored by local businesses (Dunkin Donuts, obviously, but also banks and florists, etc.). I found this funny and interesting and stored away my images and thoughts of this town for a future fictional setting.

I’d had an especially frustrating relationship that second year in Syracuse with a woman that, 1. had a boyfriend in some God forsaken far-off Southern place, 2. Refused to have sex with me, 3. Seemed much less invested in things than I was becoming. Like a lot of biographical events in my life, I tried to write about this, but once I had some perspective on what had transpired it all seemed so silly and foolish and wrong, at least from my standpoint, and much later the original short story turned into a sort of satirical romance novel exploring this awful relationship.

It seemed, as is, I think, so often the case, that I was inspired to have a certain kind of relationship and continued to hope for this even though I’d obviously thrown in with somebody looking for an entirely different sort of relationship.

The narrator of Surrender Dorothy is a romance novelist in love for the first time, and as a result finds himself inadvertently writing a roman à clef novel about a relationship that involves endless video rentals and way too much cuddling, among other things. The novel he’s producing violates all the tenants of a good formulaic romance book, but he can’t help himself.

He has a sort of sidekick in his self-taught literary agent and avid Ebayer, Swifty, who becomes a cheerleader and coach. Since at its core this is a romantic comedy, I allowed myself to insert a lot of purely comical scenes and situations, which I hope add to the overall sense of a ridiculous tragedy in progress.

I read dozens and dozens of romance books while writing this book, and I can’t remember a single detail about any of them, which, I think, is how the majority of the typical romance novels are consumed. Sort of like rice paper.

I tried to make this a novel that would at once ridicule and embrace the genre, in the same way the old Batman television series parodied an action show while actually being an action show. I even painstakingly tried to make the novel obey the romance novel formula, and though it proved impossible to maintain those underpinnings it does have a happy ending replete with rainbow.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Already

I don’t know whether I had just become too busy (a baby on the way, traveling Europe, and so forth) or whether I was deflated from rejection of my first novel, but I stopped, at some point, sending out manuscripts to publishers of any sort. I told myself I would begin this anew, and am still telling myself that.

In any event, my reading, at that time, had taken a turn toward books that were more fun. Especially as a graduate student, I’d felt obligated to read and study all the important writers, including many on the contemporary landscape, and of course there’s a lot of great literature to consume.

My very favorite books capture a range of emotions, and move effortlessly between humor and drama. Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. There are too many to name.

But I also felt that a lot of stories were well-written, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, and took all the right literary turns, but did not amount to much. Plus, every character seemed to float on a never-ending sea of despair and sadness. I guess life is like that, in a way. But in my experience, it’s also joyful and funny and you go through long stretches (for those of us that are at least normally lucky) in which you’re unencumbered by enormous problems. I read a lot of P.G. Wodehouse and Nick Hornby and Mark Twain; I read Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim and J.P. Donleavy’s The Onion Eaters. It was all pure delight with no pretention.

I started writing a story that was really just a situation: a young, directionless, fun-loving house sitter moves into an apartment below a woman with very sensitive ears. She hates noise.

This house sitter schemes, always, for a way to make quick, easy money (in this novel he’s selling baskets, ala an Avon Lady) that he intends to spend on beer, fantasy football leagues, and in general pursuit of good times. He easily falls into one meaningless relationship after another, which is fine by him, but for the life of him he can’t make any money. His best friend, on the other hand, makes a lot of money, but can’t find love, which is what he really wants, and he schemes for ways to get a much better woman than he deserves. The two, I think, are good comical partners.

I tried to put into this novel all the things I love about Chicago, and some of the things I hate, and tried to keep the conflict and tension on a purely pedestrian level. Things come to a head, so to speak, when a woman known, because of her bedroom antics, as the Screamer seeks temporarily shelter with Gurnsey, and then she becomes this time bomb waiting to go off to the deep chagrin of the uptight upstairs neighbor.

It’s a book meant to be read quickly and with great amusement, not a book to be studied and preserved. I’ve even gotten a ways toward writing the second in what might be a series of a half-dozen of these books — the protagonist Gurnsey has a different house sitting gig in a different neighborhood (Gold Coast versus Old Town) and a different fast-riches scheme (Amway salesman), and his friend Ed also has a new, innovative idea for getting women.

It’s a novel that I know does not sound interesting in summary; by nature, it’s success will depend on whether readers laugh a lot at the jokes. I know I really need these kinds of books in my library, to intersperse with the truly great novels, and maybe I’ll find some publisher that thinks there are readers that agree with me.

An Off-White Christmas

I didn’t start out writing a Christmas collection — what right-minded Atheist would? — but without meaning to I wrote one then another story centered around Christmas. StoryQuarterly published the title story about five years ago, and that story got selected as one of Best American Short Stories’ 100 Most Distinguished for that year. Then The Journal (Ohio State) published a story called “Please Be Advised” that took place in a bar with year-round Christmas lights.

After that I started consciously exploring the theme, and also using the scope of the collection to explore places in which I’d lived or known intimately. So there are stories in Las Vegas, Syracuse, Chicago, South Amana, Cave City and so on. The collection is as much about things, and what they mean to us, as it is about Christmas. But it’s also about family and the passage of time.

In “Tiny Flakes of Bone,” two gamblers meet for a bachelor Christmas in Vegas and one has the most remarkable winning streak of his life while the other loses all the profits. In “Ours Now,” an aging, childless couple search hopelessly for their lost cat only to discover that their cancer-stricken neighbor has adopted it as her own. In “Family Update,” a man gets lost in Yellowstone National Park with his smug, much despised brother-in-law. In “Bah!” an aspiring actor puts on the performance of his life as Scrooge in a Dickens’ bed and breakfast. In “Whatever’s Left of Normal,” a solider listens helplessly as a young girl dies in a Kosovo minefield.

The narrators are both women and men, young and old, a homosexual and a Jew, and they’re all told in the first person. For me, Christmas is not about Jesus’ birth or anything religious, and yet it’s still a very important annual event, and one that leaves lasting impressions. The connective tissue, other than Christmas, is love, sometimes romantic but more often not, and the importance of relationships, as well as gift giving and ownership, to our happiness.

There are 12 or 13 stories in all, probably 12, since I think I’ve decided to exclude “Please Be Advised.” I hope each of these stories stands on its own, but that the whole is much greater than the parts.

I stopped sending around the stories, with a few exceptions, once I decided to make them a collection. I wanted to be able to revise the stories to augment other stories, and also eliminate redundancies.

I did place a story at Pinyon (Mesa State, Grand Junction, Co) and another that I believe is going to be in Narrative Magazine, an online literary journal that has recently teamed with StoryQuarterly. I’ll start trying to place individual stories as soon as I can convince myself to go into secretarial mode.

Visit Don’s website. You can also meet him in person — he will be readingat Barnes & Noble (Clybourn) Thursday, April 19, 7:30 with John McNally and Elizabeth Crane.   at Centuries & Sleuths (Forest Park) Sunday, April 22, 2 pm. He’s also doing an interview segment on Chicago Public Radio’s 848 show on April 19, time unknown.

Good Money After Bad