I should probably begin with an apology. Whatever decisions were made and whatever paths that opened before me, or doors that slammed shut, all of it rests solely with me and I blame no one for what's happened – but me. I am sorry about the whole damn business.

When I first wrote Yellow Feverand worked away for months on several different drafts, it was the summer of 2004. Like every writer toiling away, I was elated at having completed a new book. Especially one that was about events that had wrapped up my life for a handful of years in a very awkward and difficult way. Those were the kind of experiences that most published writers tell people who are young and wondering what to write about to chase down and flesh out. When I was working on it everyday, I was convinced it would become some New York Times Bestseller and land me squarely on the map as a young new writer. I imagined I would be seen to be wise beyond my years, having lived both fully and intensely and naturally be something publishers would jump at and shower money on.
Except none of that happened. Not even close. How wrong I was. I was probably five or ten years too late to the writing game to make any impact with a story like what's in those pages. I queried both agents and publishers religiously. I had a checklist of the letters that went out and those who responded. I now keep those letters in a box in my garage as I'm inclined to believe that most publishers no longer send physical snail-mail rejections to anyone. I'm guessing the only mail they send out these days are just the obligatory signed copy of a contract and possibly a check. Even that now seems like a stretch by today's standards.
Most young writers don't understand that finishing a novel is just a small portion on the road to being published. One that may never materialize. I thought for sure that destiny and me would meet up at the Publisher's office one day, so I foolishly trudged forward.

This book has had many, many versions since it first birthed. But, after two years of no one wanting to publish it, I felt like giving up. I was told it was a beautiful story that was well-written and that I should submit it to writing contests in order to get recognition. It was good advice back then, but I didn't follow it. I just kept editing the book, making it cleaner, tighter, smoother. I was obsessed with it and likely in a very unhealthy way. I should've moved on to something new, but I kept on with it, not wanting to believe I'd had to shelve it. It was a crossroads and not a good one.
So, desperate and looking for anything, I decided to attend the San Francisco Writer's Conference that year and try to pitch the book to an Agent and get picked up. I practiced the pitch, but I fumbled it when having to deliver the lines cleanly. I struck out at every table I pitched at. It was humiliating and I was at an all time low. On a side not, on the first day of the conference, I had entered my email and novel synopsis into a raffle with a company called iUniverse for a free publishing package worth $1500. At the time they were seen as the slickest and most-together Print-on-Demand publisher going. They didn't have the baggage of the old vanity presses and they were seen as an up-and-coming tech company that could do well in Publishing if they grew in the right direction. They were the first company promoting eBooks – even before the Amazon Kindle device and their gold-mine delivery system of eBooks. At the time there was no way for customers to readily purchase and download eBooks on a large scale direct platform. A lot of people were interested in what they were doing.

Needless to say, I won the $1500 raffle. They contacted me and said they would publish my book and I wouldn't have to pay a dime to them and they would even market it. I was skeptical, but that was the golden egg right there. Free marketing. Back then I was too green and grateful to know that free or not, it was still a ruse and the company would end up being seen as another predatory print-on-demand business, but that revelation was still a year or more away. I had nothing to lose and was happy for the attention. These days Wikipedia says that only 50 or so writers ever made money with them. Even though I've never seen a royalty check, I'm guessing I was one of the authors as I can easily track the sales data through my Amazon author account. Yeah. Imagine that. To this day, they're still distributing the material even though I've formally asked them to stop. Back then. they were marketing a book by the 'Long Island Lolita' Amy Fisher and it was selling well. Anyone could've easily been fooled by what they were offering.
Towards the end of the San Francisco trip, I had ended drinking so much up in North Beach, my wife was absolutely livid with me and told me I was going in the wrong direction with all my plans and dreams of being a writer. She was displeased with me and I knew I needed to find someway to turn it around and start going in the right direction, so I started writing a new book while iUniverse was doing their thing with Yellow Fever. To their credit, they even did a light edit and spoke to me about the problematic nature of the title.

I explained to them that it wasn't what they thought. It was actually about how there's this nettle plant that if you get stuck with, it makes you ill for months and most doctors will mis-diagnose you with Malaria or Yellow Fever as they call it. The antidote was a type of root that was the only cure. Ironically, the main female protagonist had the same name as this poison. Imagine my surprise when I kept researching it and learned that the antidote had the same surname as the main male character? It was too much of a coincidence and so I wrote it into the the middle of the book, which was well-placed and everyone who read it, found it executed wonderfully. There's even a few reviews that thankfully cover it better than I can.

That's what it was about. Not the other definition, even if it seemed like it was. That was an intentional red-herring. To me it was poetry and I wasn't going to be talked down from my lofty, and ultimately idiotic place of blue-sky day dreaming. Looking back, some of my book titles have been my undoing. That one was no exception.
Fast forward a bit, and Greyhoundwas released by Amazon Publishing. I don't need to go into any detail here about that book or them. I've spoken at length on it already. After Greyhound came out and did well, Amazon asked me for another novel and after several months, they had been phone-calling me asking what I had ready, and what I was working on. I had Waiting for Andre mostly finished and stuffed into a drawer, but I wasn't ready to let them have that particular book. I honestly thought they weren't organized enough and would fuck it up and not publicize the book like it needed. You have to remember, Greyhound was chugging along on the Best-Seller list, but because my publicist through Amazon had absolutely no experience doing that job and no savvy marketing my name – I ended up not ever sitting down for a single interview. Not even a school newspaper. Hence my fear of giving another book to them that I had slaved away at and believed in. It felt like a losing prospect. Only a great fool would've dove in head first. Several of the other Apub authors had reached out to me quietly and shared their same concerns about the fledgling publisher and were trying to make the best of it. A few were already regretting it and trying to find their way out the back door.

For my second novel, I very quickly wrote Fugue State and they gave it a greenlight. That was a decision that likely ended my relationship with them even though I was blind at the time to see it. They wanted a close follow up to Greyhound. A like-minded companion which was an easy sell. A David Copperfield to my Oliver Twist. I didn't give them that. I gave them my On The Road instead. I didn't have a mentor at the time, so obviously I was going to eventually bungle it.
Around this time, I had a spark of genius, which I might now call a brain fever. I thought I could pitch APub my other novel which had received little traction, but had a handful of wonderful reviews and was selling well all by itself. I calculated that they had the legal muscle required to pull the book away from iUniverse, go through a heavy editing and release it as the next book in the story line. Part B of my ridiculous fever dream was that I would hire the editor Amazon had given me to edit Yellow Fever and turn it into a better more marketable story that they would have a hard time passing on. To me, it sounded foolproof … in my head.

As you can probably tell, this was ultimately a very bad idea. I threw thousands of my royalty dollars at this project. And through no fault of the editor, the book ended up an absolute mess. He hated the story and the title, hated that it was in first-person, hated that the character had the same name as the author. (Yes, I had done that), and in order to change all those things and make the title still work (remember the poison / antidote idea?) we would need to rework large sections, add a few new chapters and edit every tense usage imaginable.

Now, I've written before about how typos are the gremlins of any writer's life. My situation is no different. I seem to be absolutely cursed by them. I would go through several chapters at a time, fixing mistakes, rewriting sections and cleaning the material up, only to come back weeks later and discover that nothing had stuck and all the errors were still there and now were even more truncated and exploded. My sneaking thoughts were that someone was actually going into my material and physically changing things just to fuck with me and cause me grief. Not prone to paranoia though, I paid it little mind and just kept re-editing. However, it was getting harder each time, because no matter how good a story is, one can only re-read a book so many times. Especially in such a short period of time, too. I was blind to the short-comings in the book, I was blind to the typos and I was blind to my own foolishness that I should've never embraced to begin with.
So, after a long five months of daily work turning Yellow Fever into The Seven Hundred Dollar Raincoat, which was now a metaphor for the female protagonists psychological drama and reaction to her chosen career path, I thought I had a real winner on my hands. I thought, wrongly, that the manuscript was damn near perfect, error free and an easy read. Again – how wrong I was. It was an absolute mess and I was completely un-fucking-aware of the reality of it. My personal perspective on the book in those months is equatable to being absolutely bonkers. This is why Stephen King's advice about walking away from a manuscript for a few months before sending it out is good advice. Again, I didn't adhere to that line either.

So, I submitted it to Amazon Publishing thinking they would love it. I patiently waited to hear back and went about my business.
I'm sure they must've thought I had gone mad. They probably thought I had taken up smoking crack or some other illegal substance because surely, this couldn't be the same bloke who gave us Greyhound or the marginal, military road novel Fugue State. Embarrassed by me, I'm sure, they passed and tried to be polite about it. Not being a confrontational person, I accepted their rejection and fell down a slope of depression that kept me away from writing anything new for almost three years. Yes, I compounded one stupid decision with another. I gave up. I had my hands-full raising my son at the time, which required everything I had, so I happily shut down my creative mind and disappeared into being a parent. It felt like the most natural thing to do and likely the best move for self-preservation. I fully walked away.

About a year later, in the middle of the night, without even looking at the document, I quickly turned the manuscript into an eBook and released The Seven Hundred Dollar Raincoat on KDP for 99 cents and then vanished once more. It got three reviews. Two of them detailed the editing mess that had overtaken the book, of which I had no interest in addressing or wondering what the problems were. One person wanted their dollar back. I actually mailed them a single dollar in a birthday card that cost me $2.99 at Walgreens and then about a dollar to ship through the mail. They left a comment about it on their review thanking me for being true to my word. I should've never released the eBook. That's the real moral of the story here. For all these transgressions and piss poor calculations, once more, I apologize. Fully. I let down my readers and squandered whatever marketable interest my previous publisher had in me. It was all my doing. I'm adult enough to know when to fess up, what to own and what is relevant and important in retelling you now, after-the-fact.

You may be wondering why after reading this article I would be so candid. The point is that character is about what you do when no one is looking. Trust me, no one is looking. I'm coming clean about Yellow Fever / Seven Hundred Dollar Raincoat as a full disclosure and doing so at a time when my writing career sits in a very dark closet and no one knows me from Adam. My ego and my intuition still tell me that I have yet another chapter to go in my career and one day, people might wonder just what the hell all that was really about. I may have a stroke and completely forget about all this nonsense. I might even pass away and thirty or so years will tick by before some bright spark makes a film out of one of my books and I receive some modest level of praise or footnote of barest mention. The point is, I still believe I have a story to convey to the reader and that the reader is still interested. The publishers today might not know what to the hell to do with me, but that's just the nature of the game, isn't it? These things will eventually work themselves out. My job is to be candid about my journey and my life and above all, to keep writing novels that confound, inspire, shock and delight readers of all ages and through multiple genres. Anything less is a waste of both your time and mine.

Re-reading this material and giving the book another real and effective edit has brought a lot of this to light and was necessary food for thought. I will re-release this title when it's ready. But not before. I promise.

Who knows, one day some poor soul might have to read this for a literature class. All I can say is I feel sorry for ya mate. Everything you ever needed to know about me or any of my books can be figured out in the pages themselves.