While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make
enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all of the
professional writers above...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what
I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a
point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see! Hemingway’s quote
to the left will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output
and sales! As always, your comments are welcome!
This short story was born out of a novel that I had written called RED
DEMON.
The novel I’d written out of a frustration with the then popular
GOOSEBUMPS series of books for young people. I’d grown tired of hearing
teachers say, “Well, at least they’re reading!” It was my contention that there
was plenty of horror to go around in real life and that authors didn’t really
need to make up stories to scare kids!
The initial idea came from a camping trip we’d taken to central
Minnesota. There in Hinckley we toured the Great Hinckley Fire Museum,
detailing a horrendous conflagration that had swept over the town in 1894
killing 418 people, and in a chilling addition to ethnic hatred, “some Indians”.
Hundreds were saved as well, but the details of the fire, once I began
my research, were overflowing with “dramatic possibility”
My sources were popular, SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE RED DEMON (Larry
Millett, 1996), historical UP FROM ASHES (Grace Stageberg Swenson, 1988), and
an incredibly dull monograph called THE HINCKLEY FIRESTORM OF 1894 (collection
of reports, articles, and eyewitness accounts, 1964 – came from a University of
Minnesota collection).
The research was fascinating and I kept copious notes. When I put the
story together, I created a protagonist who was 12, and whose name was Meg and
wrapped her in the history of the period, using incidents I’d earmarked from my
research to happen to her.
I submitted the book to the editor I knew at CRICKET MAGAZINE who was
also the editor of CRICKET Books. She liked the story but had me rewrite it six
times and ultimately turned it down – after I notified her that local author Jan
Neubert Schultz had just published FIRESTORM, a novel with a young female
protagonist named Maggie...
I refused to let it go though. The story was fascinating, the incidents
numerous, and so I used everything I knew about the setting to write a short
story with entirely different characters that detailed a different aspect of
the facts. This time I used two boys in conflict, had them fall down wells and
survive the Great Hinckley Fire – and I mentioned briefly that internationally
famous journalist, Nellie Bly, had gone to Hinckley to report on the fire.
That was the ticket – the editor at CRICKET bought the story and
ordered a sidebar as well highlighting facts of the fire. One pass of her
pencil, and the story appeared two years later in the magazine.
The moral of this story is obvious – when you do lots of research on a
book, use as much of it as you can in as many ways that you can!
What about the novel? I’ve got a plan to rewrite it as a time travel
story and use it as an anchor for a second and a third novel in which young
people change their “present” in much the same way that Marty McFly changed his
present in the BACK TO THE FUTURE movies. We’ll see what happens with those,
but I’m looking forward to a return to the world of 1894 Minnesota – and I am a
much, MUCH better writer now than I was then!
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