It's Official, This Time

So, spent yesterday morning trying to doctor the synopsis:

FELIX GUZMAN is the writer whose tattered paperbacks you discover when you’re down to your last American dollar in a squalid flophouse in Timbuktu. Thirteen years ago, he vanished in the Guatemalan highlands, another pawn in a no-win civil war. Now he's Hollywood’s hottest movie franchise, a literary Jerry Garcia playing to an ever-increasing army of obsessive fans. But was he writing fiction or filing dispatches from a head-spinning tour of alternate realities? And what role did the crude wooden folk god MAXIMON play in Guzman's mysterious apotheosis?

ZZZzzzzzzzzz…

Too late. Come afternoon, there's an email from Mister Kahuna himself:

Dear Ms. DiLucchio:

I wanted to apologize to you for the long delay in responding to your submission. As I'm sure you understand, my primary responsibility is to my existing clients, not to seeking out new ones, and as a result it sometimes takes longer than I would like to get to submissions. My apologies.

I've now read the fifty pages and synopsis of THE DOOR IN THE WALL, and, while I'm impressed by your writing, I have to say that the novel didn't work for me. I never really settled into a relationship with your primary characters in those oh-so-important first pages of the novel, and it was hard for me to tell from your synopsis whether or not this would develop over the course of the manuscript.

There's obviously a lot of invention and creativity in this manuscript -- and a good creepy supernatural thriller is always a delight -- but in the end I couldn't quite figure out what to make of this one.

I hope you find another agent who disagrees with me and who provides you with the passionate and energetic representation you deserve.

Yours,
Simon Lipskar

I wrote back:

Dear Mr. Lipskar,

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to me personally -- particularly today when TROPIC OF NIGHT makes its debut.

My synopsis stunk. I know. Self-promotion always tilts me into full "Hilarity ensued" mode. In email to Dan Lazar last week, I asked if I could write another one.

I wanted to write a novel that worked as a supernatural thriller, but also as humor. This is hard to do since horror -- by dint of its necessary excesses -- is already nearkin to parody. My trick was to layer multiple points of view around a central mirage, pitting the character with the most literal appreciation of things going bump against another who carries the complete Hammer film archives in his forebrain. The downside to this is that the reader steeps in various back stories for the first 15,000 words. The Canterbury Tales set-up! But Chaucer never made it to the top of the NYT bestseller list.

No writer I've read has pulled the horror romp off successfully. I think that I have. If I could persuade you to read the complete manuscript, I'm confident you'd agree.

Since I can't, let me just say I'm impressed that someone of your professional stature is gracious enough to say "No" in such a kind way.

All best,


Now. If my life were a movie instead of a randomly generated popup window into human consciousness, Simon Lipskar would actually read my reply, and be so impressed – with its eloquence, with its humility, with its quiet self-possession – folks! This is the veritable EMILY DICKENSON OF HORROR, waiting to be discovered – that he would immediately write back, asking to see the complete manuscript. Alas, this is no movie. It is my increasingly stressed out life. I can always choose to see encouragement in the fact that he did not recommend I give up my literary ambitions and pursue a career in AM/PM mini-mart night management, I suppose. Although probably his was a form letter.