Foxfire

The book is out! I wrote a book! Please buy one for each member of your family!

It's been a long journey. 73 rejections from agents and publishers is probably bang average but each one of them hurt. My friend Tim Lewis said that I was "the thickest-skinned thin-skinned person he knows" which seems about right. If nothing else, the publishing business teaches you resilience. Here is a brief rundown of the past six years.

To write a book, you need a glass of red wine and a large map

First, you write your book. I began writing Foxfire in September 2020, six months after leaving Finland in a hurry because of the COVID epidemic. Writing a book only happens when you do the same thing over and over again. In my case, it was a case of getting up at 7:30 in the morning, doing 30 minutes of exercise, procrastinating for 90 minutes, and then taking as much time as it took to write 500 words each day. Lather, rinse, repeat. This took 160 days and was by far the most enjoyable part of the process.

Never Such Innocence Again

Second, send your manuscript off to the top ten agents in your area, all of whom would be perfectly suited for book. Point this out gently in the cover letter. Try to restrain your enthusiasm. This process started in March 2021, when the book was called The Queen of the North. After hearing nothing for 30 days, do this again with a second tranche of possible agents. Then a third. Then a fourth. Then a fifth. Rewrite your cover letter and try again with agents 51-60. Change your title. Then try 61-70. It is now seven months since you started appealing to the publishing gods. Give up.

Third, write to friends in the author business for assistance. Hear back from none of them. Think bitter thoughts relating to Shakesperean levels of ingratitude.

Fourth, get a break. Perhaps one person wants to be your agent. Or one publisher actually wants to read the manuscript. The man who owns the bookstore up the street might help. In my case, I heard from an agent who thought Foxfire might be a good fit for military hardware novels in the Tom Clancy mode (it wasn't). After a two year period, write to break off the relationship with the one person who showed some belief in you. Do this the day before Valentine's Day, 2024. Despair.

Breaking Up with Your Agent Is Hard to Do

Fifth, forget that you ever wrote a book in the first place. Think of it with the regret that you might have for any other missed opportunity in life: a lost lottery ticket, a bankrupt investment, a sliding door that has forever closed. You have had other disappointments in life. When trying out for Jeopardy! you missed a literature question (Who wrote "Under the Spreading Greenwood Tree"?) and a music question (Which Verdi opera can be translated as "The Wayward One"?) and never really got over it. Matthew Arnold was a pretty dumb guess when you had actually had coffee under Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's greenwood tree at the Blacksmith Cafe in Cambridge, and Il Trovatore will always be a different opera by Verdi from La Traviata. Forget it. You were never meant to win Jeopardy! anyway. Learn to move on.

Jen with Bertie - without either of whom the book would not exist

Sixth, someone has to remind you that it would be really cool for you to be a novelist. This is usually a person called Jen, but there are other possibilities. In my case, it was Jen Watt who said "when are you going to publish your novel, Seb?" Decide that Bertie, the hero of the book, needs to be in the Library of Congress. Cast around to find people who have self-published. Have tea with Sharyn and lunch with Phyllis and realize that self-publication is perfectly OK. Ignore people like Adam, who is a purist and believes in the immortality of art, and prefers to put only one space after each period. The perfect is the enemy of the good. You need to get your hands dirty. Pay someone to read the goddamn thing.

Some recent author friends

Seventh, write to a publisher in the hybrid mode. The publisher, Austin Macauley Press, will first take your money (about half the cost of a new furnace). They will then take the book and proofread it properly. Small errors will be corrected. You will discover that you never really learned how to use commas. Each e-mail you receive from Austin Macauley Press will hope that it finds you well. Resist the temptation to respond "I hope this e-mail finds you in a well." Three or four times the copyeditor will do something so egregious you realize that you are risking your life's work with someone who doesn't think the way you do. Accept that risk.

Finding You in a Well

When the book is ready for publication someone at the press, probably a millennial, will change all the fonts and the spacing, and italicize all the internal discourse. This is because they have read too much Dan Brown. Change everything back, explaining that if a character thinks to themselves in italics, then and only then will italics be used. Otherwise not. This intense form of self-expression happens three times in the book: once when the young Finnish resistance fighter is shot at from the train after revealing himself in the restaurant car by drinking tea instead of coffee ("All this for a fucking cup of tea," Ilmari thought), once when Guy realizes that one of the women in the street has dropped the secret code words into the conversation ("Special Forces thinks she's a man. I wonder what else they got wrong"), and once at the climax of the book which I won't spoil but is really worth waiting for, I promise. You can pre-order the book here:

Preorder | Lucas Kino

When the book is given a publication date (March 27, 2026) you will get a call from Marketing. Actually, you will get an invitation to receive a call from Marketing at a predetermined time. You will be allowed 20 minutes to speak. The conversation will go surprisingly well. Leaflets and bookmarks will be sent to your house. The book will appear slowly on bookstore websites: Waterstone's is always the first, Barnes & Noble is always the last. You will go to bookstores in your local area and ask them to stock the book. They will look at you strangely and give you an e-mail address to write to. No one will ever respond to the e-mail.

It's Party Time!

Then you will have a launch party. Janette will make 40 beakers in a glaze that miraculously mirrors the colors of the Aurora and your mother will spring for a case of champagne. People seem genuinely excited that you are going to be an author. This is very different from publishing academic books, when the only person who cares about your book is you. You remember that of the 50+ books published under your name in the Florida James Joyce Series only three of them sold more copies than Hank Aaron hit home runs. One of those three, however, is yours. You decide to write two more books in the series, one set in Madrid and one set in Provence. You pour a glass of Bollinger into a handmade beaker and wait for one of your uncles to find the typo relating to vintage cars on page 57. Your dog is in the Library of Congress. Life is good.

Borealis Glaze by the Nursery Lane Studio Wonder Woman