Karen here--I'll start off and let Jon have his say later in the post.
In 2007, I entered the first annual
Amazon Novel Breakthrough Award contest. The novel I submitted,
Easily Amused, didn't win, although it did make the first cut and was a semi-finalist. At the time, I belonged to a critique group at
Redbird Studio and amazingly enough, three other Redbird writers also made the semi-finals.
When my novel didn't make it to the next round I was disappointed, but not shocked. I was seriously surprised though, that another Redbird writer,
Jon Olson, didn't make it through. Publishers Weekly gave his novel,
The Petoskey Stone, a terrific review (they were ho-hum about
Easily Amused, argh). I knew that Jon's writing was excellent and that he had a great premise. I loved his cantankerous main character, a reporter named Steve Flaherty. (Think of the main character on the TV show "House," if he were a newspaper reporter.) I was sure this novel would do well in the contest, or barring that, get picked up by some big publisher. Inexplicably, neither happened.
When I first self-published on Kindle and my sales started to build, I was telling every novelist I knew that they should be doing this. I'm sure I was a little annoying about it, actually, but I felt like I'd discovered this wonderful new way for writers to get their work into the hands of readers, and I was almost obsessive about sharing everything I'd learned about the process. Just recently I was overjoyed to hear from Jon telling me he was ready to take the plunge. I can't tell you how happy I was to get this news. Not only because I think Jon deserves to be published, but also because I can now read
The Petoskey Stone in its entirety. And you can too, if you read Kindle books. At only $2.99, the book is a steal.
This is the description for The Petoskey Stone:
Robert B. Parker meets early Nick Hornby.
Reporter Steve Flaherty is a screw-up. Relationships blow up in his face. Newsroom diplomacy is a language he doesn't understand. But he knows a good story when he sees one, and when an industrial accident at the stadium kills two iron workers, Flaherty wants a piece of it.
Then an editor named Keri pays him a morning visit bearing banana bread. Flaherty hates banana bread, and he hates girls who make banana bread. On the other hand, she's interesting, she's real, and she's sitting right there. When she looks at him frankly, Flaherty is thrown into crisis, beginning with whether to put on his pants.
Divided three ways about most things, fretting over every decision, an obsession with falling overtaking him, Flaherty pursues answers to the crime at the stadium, and seeks solace for his obdurate heart. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In honor of Jon finally taking my advice, I asked him to answer a few questions for the blog. I noticed that he answered very honestly, which is something I admire in a person.
When and how did your interest in writing fiction first manifest itself?
I’ve been keeping a journal since I was 15 or 16, and I started to write short pieces in college. It was reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” that really turned me on. I thought, “I can do that.” But, of course, I couldn’t do anything like it. Early on, I got a short story published in The Antioch Review, and I’ve been a journalist for many years. But, in the book-length fiction realm, it’s been a long slog. I’ve been writing four or five or six days a week, most weeks, for years, to get even as far as I am, which is not very far. In my most despairing periods, I have tried to quit, but it always drew me back. I would think, “I’ll just do this for myself,” which, if you like doing it, can provide some limited satisfaction.
Why did you decide to self-publish on Kindle?
I tried the agent route, sent to dozens, and got many nice rejections, and some eviscerating ones. In that period, an editor at Warner Books (now Grand Central Publishing), Frances Jalet-Miller, who works part-time at an agency, took an interest in
THE PETOSKEY STONE, and helped me revise it, working with me through e-mails for months, and was a great help and encouragement. I will always be grateful to her. But in the end, Warner didn’t take it, and it’s been sitting for a few years. It was reviewed pretty well in the 2007 Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest – whoever read it, I felt, really got it – but even sending that review along with my queries didn’t help me with agents.
My book is not to every taste, and the main character is a little prickly, and I wonder if he plays better for men than for women. Maybe. Maybe not. He’s a little like McNulty in “The Wire.” A cad, in many ways. Most of the agents and editors I had reading it were women, and I wonder to what extent reactions to my book are influenced by gender. Some said, “This is too personal for me.” And some said they just plain didn’t like him. Of course, the truth is, men read less women – they’re watching TV – and I can see an agent reading it, liking it, and thinking: But who’s going to buy it?
Meanwhile I’d been watching Karen succeed with Kindle. Our writing histories are similar, I think, though she was more successful with agents than I was, and is more prolific. I thought, Why not try it? Every writer wants to be read.
And a million thanks to Karen, for giving me this forum, and coaching me through the process.
Steve Flaherty, the main character of your novel is a bit of a grouch. Is he based on someone you know?
He’s an exaggerated version of me, mixed together with some journalists I know. I was never what he is, a hot reporter. I’ve spent most of my career so far as a lowly copy editor, with some periods as a reporter. But his attitudes, his skepticism and cynicism, are qualities I brought to my work as copyeditor, where the job is to challenge stories, fix problems, check the sourcing, and ask the bigger questions, like Why are we publishing this? Even: What is our mission? What are we supposed to be doing? I was often disdainful, not just of the copy, quite a lot of which is really horrible, but of the people who wrote it, which made me unpopular with reporters. Some of them hated to see me coming. I was even called on it in performance reviews, and worked hard to mend my ways. You get better cooperation – and better stories – when you can be nice about it.
How does your background in journalism influence your fiction?
I think newsrooms are underappreciated as subcultures. The ones I’ve been in range from dictatorships (benevolent or not) to democratic states. What makes them fascinating is that they hold themselves up as “objective” and “fair,” and yet the people in them are filled with blind spots and agendas that they don’t even realize they have. The old newspaper adage, “afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted” is sometimes more accurate inverted: “afflict the downtrodden, congratulate the comfortable.”
Tell us about your writing process.
When my life isn’t too fragmented by work and family and everything else, I sit down in the morning and write for two or three hours. If I get a full page down, that’s a good day. Sometimes I get more, sometimes I get less. Then the next day I’ll sit down and fix what I didn’t like about the day before’s work, and move on. For me, stringing days together is more important than how long I work every day. I have to stay close to the material, or it’ll take me days to work back into it.
How do you feel about Karen McQuestion? (ha, only kidding...)
Karen is the greatest.
Jon Olson is a journalist and writer based in Milwaukee. His background includes a graduate fiction seminar with Leslie Epstein at
Boston University.
His short fiction has appeared in The Antioch Review, and his reporting has appeared in The Milwaukee Journal, and its successor, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he worked for 18 years.
He has done research and writing projects for Sports Afield, and for two years produced a weekly TV talk show at the local PBS station.
