The Story of a Novel

The story of how my novel, "The Byrds of Victory," got published is almost as involved as the book itself. I started writing the second novella, "The Fields Are Ripe for Harvest," in Glenwood Springs, Colo., in the mid-1970s, five or six years after going on wheat harvest through Texas and the Midwest to Montana. I finished it in the mid-70s in Abilene, Texas, got a New York literary agent and started the novella that opens the novel, "I Am a Freight Train," while we tried unsuccessfully to sell the harvest novella, then titled "Swath." Both novellas are heavily fictionalized, but "I Am a Freight Train" uses some stories my Dad had told over the years.

Starting in 2005, I began getting poems and short stories into online literary magazines, but my success there had stalled when we moved to Cape Girardeau last fall. I had kept the original typed manuscripts of the novellas, and it seemed the new locale would afford a chance to put them into a desktop file and combine them into a novel. After querying over 200 literary agents and publishers, I was very grateful when Price World Publishing offered in December to publish "The Byrds of Victory" as an eBook.

Written in the first person, "I Am a Freight Train" is the story of welder-farm workers' union organizer Preacher Byrd, and I think it is a good representation of the personality of an unusual man. "The Fields Are Ripe for Harvest" takes a different approach, telling the story of three teenage boys who work for a family from Victory, Texas, with the naturalistic technique developed by Stephen Crane and others, using only what the characters, do, say and experience. The idea is to make the reader a participant in the story.

The novel runs a little over 71,000 words. It's as good as I could make it when I wrote the original manuscripts and as I edited and rewrote parts of them recently. I'm starting a novel that I hope will be better, but you never know with a creative endeavor. You just do your best and hope.