Well hell, it only took 30 years...

My first real manuscript sale just happened.

Signing with my agent in 2011…lmao, nothing happened. But now…

I got the greenlight from the acquisitions editrix earlier today, so here’s the news for all you fine folks who follow me on the Stack:

My middle-grade contemporary fantasy novel FOSSIL FORCE will be published with Raconteur Press at a time yet to be determined. (Gotta do contract stuff, I don’t know what all that will entail, after that I’ll know the timeline.)

If Raconteur sounds familiar to you, I’ve published with them once before, and been rejected as well. They do a huge amount of work in anthologies, and last summer they grabbed my short story The Last Flight of the Gargoyle, based loosely on my Papaw’s experience in the Korean War. With this manuscript sale, my acceptance rate just rose to .500.

What is Fossil Force?

I kicked this idea around for a long time. I can’t remember where it started, but it took shape about five years back when I was working in remote towns in Utah; Tooele, Grantsville, Moab, Blanding…they all had these little qualities that mixed together well for a setting that I liked.

There was originally going to be a core cast of five kids (3 boys, 2 girls) but every time I tried to figure out the girl characters I came up empty. Then Raconteur announced that they wanted fiction for young male readers, no romance, just boys having adventures together, and I thought “Screw it, scrap the girls, make this a boy book and see how it comes out.”

I reduced the cast to four characters, all boys, and gave them a mission: find four ancient power armors from the desert and learn how to operate them before bad guys from the Hollow Earth try to invade the surface. The power armors get boosts and extra abilities if they absorb energy from fossils in the ground.

From there I fleshed it out and added the details that gave it life, and I was beyond pleased with the result. I read it to my sons (11 and 9) and they ate it up. Granted, your kids are always gonna be your hype team even if it sucks, and I reminded myself of that…but I could tell they were into it. My son would randomly talk to me about the book even if we were doing something else, and he’d recount his favorite parts. I think that’s how I knew I had it right.

(His favorite part was chapter 11, “The Battle of Profunda Wash,” btw.)

Anyway it took a few months for Raconteur to get through their abundant submission backlog, but they all loved it and they said I hit it out of the park. That’s an incredible feeling that I’ve been chasing for a very, very long time.

How long have I been writing?

Since I was eight. No joke, no smoke. My third grade teacher would laminate and spiral-bind little stories that we wrote, definitely with money out of her own pockets, and I must have written twice as many dinky little stories as anyone else in that class. I just put pen to paper and found my calling.

Since then I have literally always been making a story. Even during my mission I daydreamed stuff and took notes on my day off. When I got home I sent submissions off to publishers and started getting rejections. From 2011 to 2013 I even had an agent, but she couldn’t place my books anywhere because what I wrote was…weird. Then it became unfashionable to be a straight white Christian male, so I jumped off submissions for a time and just stuck to indie.

But after a decade of self-publishing my stuff with no tangible marketing arm, I finally said screw it, I need to change it up. There are plenty of small presses out there that do a decent job of racking up sales and they don’t care who you are so much, as long as you can tell a story right. I have three in mind that I’m writing stories for, based on their interests and where they overlap with mine.

Am I going to keep submitting?

That’s the plan, naturally. No matter what, I’m going to keep writing and publishing, even if I make something that is only a fit for my self-pub model. But if I write something and a publisher wants it first, well…ha ha, “Oh nooooo” ha ha…

So what’s next?

As far as Raconteur? I don’t know, I’m sure I’ll do a few more rounds of edits to get the book just right, and then I assume that sequels will depend on sales. On Flag Day I sent a manuscript in to another publisher, they were waiting on that one after a conversation we had in February, and now I’m working on a second manuscript for them (in response to a specific pitch they had.) If they don’t want this book, I have another publisher lined up who is interested.

None of these are of the “ten thousand dollar advance” variety, but they’ve all got marketing apparatuses that I lack, so it’ll be a boost from what I’m used to. Thus if you’re keeping track at home, I have:

Fossil Force—sold to Raconteur.

Answerable Courage—subbed to Ark Press, awaiting verdict.

Soil 2076: A Saga of the Tricentennial—part of Ark press’s 2076 contest. The deadline is 10/7 so the bulk of my writing time is tied up in this manuscript (which so far is a lot of fun.)

Anywho…that’s the score. I finally sold a full manuscript and not just a short story, and it feels amazing. I hope you and all your young male reader friends really like it so I can write at least two and possible four sequels. We shall see.

Thanks for reading. Get back to work.