After many years of toiling in obscurity, I can finally say, "Hey, somebody actually likes me!" As of August 9, 2012 I'm in possession of a signed and more importantly co-signed book contract from The Writer's Coffee Shop Publishing House for my debut novel EXOTIC MUSIC OF THE BELLY DANCER. I'm an overnight sensation, and by "overnight" I mean 22 years.

Yes, I said 22 years. James Lee Burke once famously had a novel rejected 111 times over a nine-year period. THE LOST GET-BACK BOOGIE, a bluesy, liquor-fueled trip about a Korean War vet in the '60s who heads out West after being paroled from a Louisiana prison farm, was eventually picked up by LSU Press. Shortly thereafter, THE LOST GET-BACK BOOGIE was of course nominated for the Pultizer Prize in Fiction.

Okay, so it hasn't technically been 22 years that I have been trying to get published; rather, it's been 22 years since I started writing. It was in 1990, when I was a freshman at Marian College in Indianapolis, that I realized I had a way with words. Throw in the fact I had been a trained speed reader since the age of 10, and suddenly creative writing and English classes came effortlessly. I never studied, ever. If you gave me six hours, a pot of coffee and a pack of Marlboro Lights, I could write a minimum 10-page report. Give me a week and I could write a dissertation. Give me five minutes and I could write an excruciatingly cheesy poem that would make, to quote Barry Manilow, the young girls cry. Needless to say, much to my parents' consternation, I didn't really care much for the reports or the dissertations.

But then the world conspired against me. My father was killed in a car accident when I was 21 years old. I was left with an anchorless family, and I didn't want to be the anchor. So I wrote, drank, smoked a little pot, wrote, drank, dropped out of school for a little while, wrote some more. In the mid-90s, after somehow convincing a college to give me a diploma, I penned a 110,000-word socio-theological "epic" entitled THE MESSIAH PROJECT. I was proud of myself. I still remember celebrating in my trashy little apartment with my then-fiance, now-wife-of-17-years. We drank a couple bottles of Two-Buck Chuck and debated over who would direct the movie version. Over the next five years THE MESSIAH PROJECT was rejected by every major literary agent and publisher in the English-speaking world. 

Looking back, I needed to write THE MESSIAH PROJECT. As bad as that book was--and trust me, it was horrible--I needed to learn how to write before I could learn how to write well. I needed to know how to regiment my time, how to make myself sit down in front of a computer screen and type for two hours a day even when I had nothing to say. And ultimately, I needed the rejection. I'm a firm believer that good writers succeed in direct proportion to the number of times they're called bad ones. Eventually, after finally mustering the courage (and humility) to stuff THE MESSIAH PROJECT in a Kinkos box in my attic, I started writing again. I also started reading nothing but books by authors who fit my profile: young, male, alienated, funny as hell, a little disturbed. Hello Eggers. Hello Sedaris. Hello Palahniuk. Then I re-familiarized myself with the New Journalists: Capote, Thompson, Mailer, Wolfe. What emerged from that personal journey, along with (amazingly enough) a rock-solid marriage to a smoking-hot wife, three kids who pretend I'm cool, and a comfortable life in the suburbs, was EXOTIC MUSIC OF THE BELLY DANCER. 

BELLY DANCER's journey was by no means painless. It took me two years to get an agent and six years to get a publisher. In those six years the manuscript was completey rewritten once and made it to three ed-board meetings (the publishing equivalent of third base). I was great at getting one editor to like me, but getting an entire room of editors was a different story.

Now, finally, it's the readers' turn.