Whoopee! A Literary Agent agreed to handle our book!
My daughter and I had spent a week of long days sitting on hard folding chairs at a Mystery Writers Seminar. Now it was party time in my other daughter’s kitchen. In gratitude for her driving us around, feeding us and giving us bunks, we inducted her into ‘The Flatbutt Society’ with exuberant silliness.
Next morning getting on a plane for home, the stewardess took my carry-on from me. The overheads were full. After the short flight, she handed it back. As I started across the terminal to my car park, I realized both wheels on the bag were broken off.
The wheels came off our project.
The agent accepted our proposal of sample chapters and a full outline. Our ‘Cozy’ had an amateur detective solving a murder with gentle humor. Discovering ‘who done it’ was complicated by the clash of Dutch and Scandinavian cultures in a small town.
We had lived the nuances of food preferences, the tension of café conversation and disagreements over different life style choices in a bucolic village. Putting this into words on a page for a ‘Cozy’ was harder than we first imagined.
Our book project died dead. Publishers were not buying ‘Cozies’. The reading public wanted ‘Procedurals’ that depict hard boiled cops roaming the mean streets to make war on druggies, drunks and other low-life citizens.
We were functionally illiterate about Murder Mystery. Our book was never published.
47% of American adults are functionally illiterate according to statisticians. With powerful new digital technology, our knowledge in history and science has exploded. In the words of an old hymn: time makes ancient good awkward!
Take the story of Ben Franklin flying a kite in a thunder storm and discovering electricity.
A new biography puts that story into a whole new context. Born into a poor working class family, Ben came to Philadelphia at sixteen broke but knowing how to run a printing press. He parlayed that into a publishing empire.
Using the popularity of his “Poor Richard’s Advice”, he franchised printing shops in all 13 colonies. This gave his newspaper and eventually his “Poor Richard’s Almanac” a huge circulation and made him rich.
At age 42, he decided he had enough money to live on the rest of his life. He retired and devoted himself to scientific research.
The kite incident led him to invent a lightening rod. He refused to patent it. His reason: why should I make myself richer on reducing the number of people’s homes burnt down by lightning strikes?
At his own expense, he went to France to plead for guns, professional soldiers and a navy. He got them. At the Battle of Yorktown, they won the Revolutionary War.
He then helped write the Constitution which created the United States of America.
I wonder. Shouldn’t we petition the National Park Service to add Ben Franklin to Mt. Rushmore? As the inventor of American Free Enterprise Capitalism, he’s earned the honor!
