Caveat for Agents and Editors: Don’t let the following narrative scare you off.  Although WOG evolved over a very long period of time, in 2006 I actually wrote over 160,000 words nights and weekends in six months while working full time at another job, then edited the final version down in 2007  from 278,000 words to the current 118,760 words in about three months while still working at my  full time job.  Now that I am educated as to agent and publisher requirements, I expect I can comfortably produce new works in the 80,0000 to 100,000 word range approximately every six months.

Though it sounds like a cliché line thrown out at the beginning of a cheap novel, Wage$ of Greed really did have its genesis while it was dark and rainy.  It took place in early 1979 as I sat at my kitchen table in Livermore, California unable to work at my job as a swimming pool electrical contractor because of the weather.

The idea of writing a story had been kicking around in my head for some time.  Prior to living in Livermore, I had lived in the Four Corners area town of Farmington, NM situated in the middle of the largest natural gas field in North America.  San Juan County was literally pockmarked with tens of thousands of natural gas and oil wells. To the west and south of Farmington lay the vast Navajo Indian Reservation.  One day in 1975 the thought struck me that there might be a good story in the idea of an oil company screwing Indians out of royalties on reservation wells.  But I was busy and my life full of turmoil at the time so I filed the thought away and only brought it out and dusted it off on that fateful day in 1979 when it was raining and I didn’t have anything else to do.

To this day I don’t know where all the thoughts and words came from.  Once I started writing it was as if I were actually living my thoughts.  The words seemed to flow and the first few pages of the manuscript began to pile up on the kitchen table.  I called the story San Juan, after the county in which Farmington was located.

That night when my wife, (since divorced), got home from her job, she very nearly aborted my writing career in its very first hours.  She asked, “What are you doing?”

“I guess I’m writing a book,” I replied.

She looked at me with an air of incredulity and disbelief.  She knew I was an electrician, not a writer.  “What’s it about?” she asked.

“It’s a story about a young attorney who discovers an oil company is trying to screw some Indians out of royalties on gas wells the oil company drilled on their reservation.  The oil company is trying to kill the attorney”

“You don’t know anything about that kind of stuff.”

“Do too! I used to live right where this sort of thing could happen.  I know a lot about oil and gas fields and I’ve been around Navajos since I was a kid.”

“What else did you do today?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s what I thought.  You’ve wasted all day.”  She laughed at me quite derisively and asked, “Just what makes you think you can write a book anyway?”

I was humiliated and embarrassed.  Indeed, what did made me think I could write a book.  I’d never gone to college or studied writing.  I nearly failed high school English because I refused to write two research papers.  Maybe I really didn’t have any business thinking I could write a book. 

Nonetheless, the idea persisted.  On the rare occasions I sat down at the typewriter after that, my wife let it be known that as far as she was concerned, I was engaged in a total waste of my time.  After a while I put the typewriter away and only brought it out at times when she wasn’t around.  But for some reason, in the back of my mind, I really did think I might be able to write a book.

Unfortunately, neither my ambition for writing nor that marriage lasted much longer.  A little over a year later a business partner breached a contract with me on a spa manufacturing venture.  It cost me everything I owned, including my marriage. I was having a tough time finding two nickels to rub together.  For a while I ended up living with some friends, Terry and Suzy Eustice.

One day while I was riding down the freeway I heard a news story about Mobile Oil losing a lawsuit to a tribe of Indians over exactly the scenario I had postulated in my fledgling book. When I got home I dug my manuscript out, took it to Terry and Suzy and told them the story about how I’d started this book a couple of years back.  I told them that just today I had heard on the car radio a story what could have come directly off the pages.  They read what I had written and responded, “You’ve got to finish this.”  Terry and I were working together installing spas at the time.  He told me, “Your new job is to write this story.  I’ll put in the spas, you write the book.”

I did exactly that for several weeks.  Unfortunately, my ex-wife retained custody of the typewriter and the Eustices didn’t own one, so I spent my days writing the story out longhand on a succession of yellow legal pads, blissfully unaware that things for me were about to get much worse.

Terry and I were desperately trying to get back into the spa manufacturing business but we didn’t have any money.  I had sued the ex-business partner who’d caused my desperate straits, but prospects of any money from that venture were a long way off at best. I couldn’t afford an attorney and was representing myself against a very rich man who had a whole law firm full of high-powered attorneys behind him.

We heard from a friend about a guy in Oakdale, CA who might be willing to back us, so we went to Oakdale to investigate.  We liked the guy and believed him when he said he had enough money to get us a new start for a share in the company.  He said we could use his large garage to begin operations.  Being that I was single at the time, I agreed to move to Oakdale and start making the fiberglass tools we would need to get the business off the ground.  It turned out the guy didn’t have enough money and I ended up living in the cold, unheated garage with no running water or personal facilities all through the winter of 1982.  There were times when I literally had to make a decision to either buy a tube of toothpaste or a pound of hamburger because I didn’t have enough money for both.  Needless to say, all my time and ambition during that period were consumed in just somehow staying alive rather than writing a book.

In 1983 things were looking up.  I had a place to live and a job of sorts, all the while trying to keep up with the lawsuit.  I was once again beginning to find a little time to write.  Believe it or not, even though I was representing myself, I actually won the lawsuit in the three-week jury trial in Merced, California and sustained the judgment through appeal.  The downside of all that was that although I won the lawsuit, the Defendants promptly bankrupted and I got nothing. 

However, working at the book in drips and drabs along the way, by 1985 I had the book finished.  Shortly thereafter I moved to San Diego.  This was the era of typewriters, not word processors or computers, so the manuscript copy was all there was.  In the process of the move, the manuscript was lost.  I was left with nothing to show for all the work I had put into my book.  It seemed as if I was not destined to become a professional writer.

But being the stubborn fool I am, I didn’t give up, I started over.  Even with working very long hours at my full-time job, I again had the book virtually completed by early1989.  Then I did two things.  The first was that I sent a sample off to the Scott Merideth agency to have it evaluated.  They wrote back and said it was not publishable.  They said I was a good writer but this story wouldn’t sell. 

I was quite a different type of guy back then than I am now, and the book at the time was quite pornographic.  The evaluator said of one particularly long sex scene, “Thirty Five Pages?  This is some of the best pornography we’ve ever read but all of us in my office are completely exhausted!” 

However, the other thing I did was ultimately to lead to something very good.  For a couple of years I had been reading books by a very good author by the name of Tony Hillerman.  Hillerman was writing in much the same genre as my book.  I got the bright idea that if I could talk him into collaborating on my book, he could get another book published with very little work and I could claim my first publication as a professional author.  I packaged up my proposal and a sizable chunk of the manuscript as a sample and sent it off to his agent, trusting that it would eventually reach him.  It never did!  It’s probably fortunate it didn’t because at the time the book had a very ‘blue’ cast to its content.  But nonetheless, this act ultimately led to an extraordinary experience you’ll hear about later on.

Meridith’s evaluation and Hillerman’s failure to respond led me to put the book away for a couple of years.  Then in 1991, after selling my steel fabrication business, I decided to semi-retire.  In the depths of my premature indolence I began thinking about how good the story and premise of San Juan (that’s what I called it back then) was, no matter how inexpertly it was crafted at the time.  Having plenty of time on my hands, I again dug the book out to see if I could resurrect it.  About this time I became reacquainted with a very dear person to me.  She was my sweetheart just out of high school and the first love of my life, Kathy Young, now Kathy Phipps of San Manuel, Arizona.  When we reconnected with each other, Kathy, now married to Dennis Phipps, came to Utah, were I was living, and, among other things, helped me quit a very bad smoking habit; something I would never have been able to do without her help.  While there, Kathy read some of the book and wanted me to finish.  She invited me to come down to Arizona to stay with her and Dennis while I wrote.  I agreed, and was soon back in the saddle with my writing efforts doing a total rewrite of the book.  

By now my personal values had changed significantly.  As a result, this time San Juan was very different.  This time around I didn’t have to worry about whether my mother might find some of the pages and read them.  Jason Stevens, who once romped from bed to bed and finally ended up In Flagrante Delecto with a lusty and willing Cass Sanders, suddenly became a quite proper young Mormon attorney who meets Cass, a devout Mormon girl, and falls in love with her. With great difficulty they successfully resist the temptation to succumb to their strong and obvious physical and emotional attraction.  Gone was nearly all the course language and the frequent lurid sex scenes.  Like the author, the book had matured and gone quite mainstream.  In the process it became a far better, more appealing and palatable work. 

Just as things were beginning to roll along with the rewrite at the Phipps’ home, both my parents suffered serious injuries.  I had to stop my writing and return to Utah to take care of them.  I sadly said farewell to Kathy, whom I always had and always will love, and Dennis who had become one of my life’s heroes and a dear and much-treasured friend.

Again back in Utah, the book soon took a back seat to the necessities and demands of life and living.  I pecked along slowly at the third rewrite for nearly ten more years.  At the end of that time, with about 140,000 words done, I figured I was still only about half-finished. 

One of the reasons I was so slow was that I had always viewed the book as my springboard into retirement.  I had delusions of simply sitting back, waiting until the magic time I could finish the book and then cranking it out and sending it off to the publishers where I would become instantly rich and famous and never have to worry another day about getting by in my declining years.  It all was so easy in my imagination.

Finally, in the winter of 2006  (age 60) I decided, despite my long hours at a full-time job, I better get busy and finish the book.  I was now married to a wonderful woman, Lauri, who was very supportive of what I wanted to do.  We’d just sent the last of our children off to meet the world and I felt the proper time had come. 

I cranked up the computer in February of 06 and began banging away.  Working nights and weekends, I plunked out another approximate 139,000 words over the next six months and finished the last word about ten o’clock at night on the 20th of June.  San Juan was finally finished, and this time the work was eminently publishable – or so I thought.

The time had come to think about who would publish the book.  I was extremely unknowledgeable and naïve about the process.  I could barely spell the word ‘agent’ let alone had one.  I decided to check Tony Hillerman’s website and see who his publisher was.  (Remember my mentioning him before?  Here’s where that story gets interesting.)   I found his website and suddenly felt as if my fledgling writing career had dropped out from under me like a load of rocks. 

Hillerman’s website featured two books.  One of them was entitled The Sinister Pig.  I read the synopsis and literally became physically ill.  It said the story was about a rich man who had a large ranch near Dulce, NM, east of Farmington and that the man was using a network of secret natural gas pipelines to enrich himself.  The synopsis sounded like a carbon copy of the book I had been writing and rewriting for twenty-five years and upon the sale of which I intended to retire.   I couldn’t believe my eyes when it appeared that Tony Hillerman had plagiarized and published the idea of book.

I spent the money on one of those Internet people search sites to find Mr. Hillerman’s home address.  I then fired off three letters, one to Hillerman, one to his agent and one to the legal department of his publisher, Harper Collins.  Then I ordered a copy of the book from Amazon.  Along with my letter to Mr. Hillerman, I included a manuscript copy of San Juan.

My letters were not demand letters in the traditional sense.  I was more broken-hearted than angry.  I simply requested that if it turned out there was a problem, that rather than going through the trauma of demands and lawsuits, they help me get my book published if the storyline was dissimilar enough to differentiate the two works.  While I waited to receive Hillerman’s book I called Harper’s legal department several times.  One of their staff attorneys finally called me back.  I told her of the problem and said that I had ordered the book.  She was very kind and asked me to get in contact with her as soon as I had read the book. 

Before the book arrived from Amazon, to my surprise I received a hand written letter from Mr. Hillerman.  He was very kind and gracious.  He said he had turned his home upside down looking for my 17 year old sample manuscript.  He said he didn’t remember ever receiving it from his agent or reading it.  He recited how he had come up with his story and asked me to be in touch with him after I’d had a chance to read “Pig”.  Surprisingly, he said he had read enough of my manuscript to tell that I was a good writer and that San Juan was a good book.  He gave me the name of two literary agents, including his, and gave me permission to use his name recommending me and my book to them. 

After reading The Sinister Pig I was delighted to find that although some of the basic elements were similar, his story and mine were nothing at all alike.  It had been simply an ironic quirk of how the web page synopsis was written that made the two stories sound nearly identical.  Naturally, I wrote everyone an apology letter over the false alarm.  However, since that time Mr. Hillerman and I have communicated fairly regularly.  I have treasured every word from this gracious gentleman who is one of the heroes in my life and look forward to meeting him sometime in the future.

In August of 2006 I sent off my first query.  It was to Mr. Hillerman’s agent, Ms. Maurine Walters, requesting representation for San Juan.  She requested an exclusive read of the first one hundred pages for thirty days.  I agreed, sent the sample pages off and waited.  I never heard back from her.

After waiting for six weeks I assumed she was not interested and began sending queries to other agents.  I sat back looking forward to the flood of requests to read my full manuscript.  By October I could have wallpapered my office with rejection slips.  Not one agent wanted to read the book.

Obviously something was wrong.  I’d had the book test read by quite a number of people and received unanimous rave reviews.  I decided to do some research to see if I could find out what might be wrong.  What I discovered was that agents were looking for books ranging from 70,000 to 100,000 words.  If the book were over 120,000 it was the kiss of death for a new author.  Agents wouldn’t even look at the work.  San Juan was 278,000 words long. 

Then began one of the most painful experiences of my life.  I again had to rewrite my book – for the fourth time.  Only this time I wasn’t writing it, I was unwriting it.  After going through the book twice and eliminating every extraneous word I could find, it was still over 230,000 words.  I had to start excising events, and even more painful, characters that upon writing had seemed absolutely indispensable to the story.  It was agonizing, excruciating.  It felt like I was executing my own children or performing self-surgery without anesthetic. 

I spent the winter going through this exercise in self-flagellation, and finally in March of 07, had excised over 168,000 words.  I had pared the tome down to an anorexic, measly 118,790 words.  At that size I was still flirting with the outside edges of agent acceptability, but had made it under the deadly precipice of 120,000 words. 

But what was left turned out to be a much better book.  Even I had to admit that it was a tighter, faster paced, better read than my “gigantanormous” version.  (Several people suggested I break it up into at least three separate books.  However, the story didn’t lend itself to serialization or I would have done that.)

I retitled the book Wage$ of Greed (WOG) and began sending out a new round of query letters – and shortly began receiving back more rejection slips.  About this time, I finally heard from Ms. Walters - another rejection slip.  

Taking a chance, I wrote her back and explained that in my naiveté as a new author I had no idea what a monumental task I had asked her to take on in selling the gigantanormous version of my book.  I told her I had rewritten and retitled the book, sent her a short synopsis and begged her reconsideration.  A week or so later I got an email from Jenny Fitsimmons, her assistant, requesting that I resend the first 100 pages.  They were quickly on their way. 

Then, as if to shoot myself in the foot, I decided to make a major structural change to the book.  I read an article that said many authors of thrillers don’t draw their readers into the action of the story soon enough.  I realized I had spent the first seven chapters of WOG building characters and story structure with very little action.  I decided to move chapter eight to chapter one and draw the reader into the first gas well explosion in the very first pages.  The problem was, I had already sent Ms. Walters the original version.

In this time period I also had written a four-page market analysis for the book and begun construction on my website.  So taking a chance on blowing myself completely out of the water on the only agent inquiry I had going for me at the time, I sent Ms. Walters the revised 100 pages and a copy of the marketing analysis. 

Something must have worked.  Two weeks later I received an email from Jenny saying Ms. Walters wanted to read the entire manuscript.  Needless to say, I was jubilant.  The $30 overnight package went out within a couple of days. 

And that’s where we are today; breathlessly awaiting word from Ms. Walters on the full manuscript.  I am still sending out queries though at a significantly reduced pace, and still getting one rejection slip after the other.  Apparently I have chosen to write in a genre that does not do well at attracting the attention of the esoteric and somewhat jaded members of the elite New York book agents’ fraternity.  I fear that most agents sitting in their New York ivory towers, view WOG as just a modern day cowboy and Indian story that doesn’t appeal to their more erudite, sophisticated and urbane literary tastes.  What they don’t understand is that ordinary people who read it love it.

I have had the book professionally reviewed by Dr. David Rosier, a doctorate level college literary and creative writing professor who used to be a book agent himself and who happens to hate typical action/adventure novels.  Dr. Rosier, like virtually every other person who has ever read the book, has given me an enthusiastic and strong endorsement.  He characterized WOG as being, “filled with strong characters and an engaging and entertaining storyline.” 

I have discovered a resource where, as a last resort, I can have the book published myself on an “on-demand” basis.  If you’re reading this, you have found my website and know that I’ve already started marketing WOG, though am still waiting for agent representation and to have the book picked up by a major publisher.  I am still plugging away sending out queries and hoping to soon have an agent and a mainstream publisher.  The instant that happens, I’ll get back to work on the second in the Danny Whitehorse/Jason Stevens series entitled Montezuma Creek.