Books

My First Novel: The Night before Christmas

Thirty Years! What Took So Long?

Life, that’s what. I got the idea in the early 1970s when I was driving and listening to a news program on the radio. The newsman was reporting on a man who shot his children on Christmas Eve. I was shocked, and I immediately asked myself, “Why would anyone do that?” I wrote the novel as an answer to my question. It is about why one man would do that.

I was a married college student with two small children when I started writing the novel. Then I was an English teacher with five classes of thirty students each a day. I wrote when I could. About ten years later, I had a novel and began looking for an editor or agent. It was the 1980s. The feedback from an agent was that no one would want to read a novel about a man killing his children on Christmas Eve. I spent the next twenty years trying to figure out how to save the children without violating who the characters were. I finally figured it out in the early 2000s.

Having saved the children, I started the marketing process again. I attended writing conferences and pitched to agents and editors. The editor for a major publisher agreed to review my manuscript. I sent it and waited. And waited. And waited some more. And then Andrea Yates, who had been convicted of killing her children in 2001, was retried in 2006 and found not guilty by reason of insanity. She had killed her children to save them from hell. This was the same motive as my main character, Wes Myers, in The Night before Christmas.

With a real life story in the news, I wrote to the editor, making him aware of the news and thinking this would be an excellent time to publish my book. Six weeks or so passed and no answer. I wrote again and waited. No answer. The third time, I demanded my manuscript returned. A couple of weeks later, the manuscript arrived. Not a single page looked as though it had been touched. No creases or stains. Nothing.

At that time, simultaneous submissions were frowned on. The editor had had my manuscript for close to a year. At that time, I was sixty-three years old. I reasoned that I might not live long enough to see my book published if I went the traditional route. Print on demand was just getting started. I wouldn’t have to pay for hundreds of copies at one time. I found Lulu, and after thirty years, my first novel was published.