Sometimes it worries me that my fiction writing is so much more muse-dependent than my history. I never know when the muse might go off on vacation; when she is on duty, I don't know how she works. Thus it was reassuring to me that the story of FINAL REFUGE honest-to-God came to me in a dream. I can't tell you the dream here without giving away the end of the book, but I awoke in the wee hours that morning after a scarifying nightmare, sketched the scene and knew I had to construct a story to get there.
I told my then-agent about the experience and he asked how he should pitch it. Having seen Robert Altman's wonderful film, "The Player", I knew about pitches, and I knew that, for instance, Gene Roddenberry got nowhere trying to sell "Star Trek" until he thought to pitch it as "It's 'Wagon Train,' in Outer Space." Having already considered the pitch, I answered, "It's 'Die Hard,' in the zoo." On the surface the story is about running a wildlife park, but the subtext is the struggle to save endangered species from extinction.
By this stage of my career, I had a much better grasp of the principle that authors are as responsible for the marketing of a book as the publisher. I took it upon myself to contact a hundred zoos and aquaria around the United States, and got offers from about a dozen of them to appear at fund raisers for their zoological societies, which was a glorious hook for a book tour—captive targeted audience, dead-on certain invitations to talk shows, access to non-profit mailing lists. When the book sold to St. Martin's Press, my hackles went up because of the recent disaster with the Texas history book, but this time, they promised, things would be different.
In truth, things started going sour even quicker than they did with Spindletop. They limited the story to 85,000 words when it needed perhaps twice that length. (I had not yet read Richard Curtis' Beyond the Best Seller, which contains his thoughts about publishers who try to hedge their possible losses by guaranteeing the failure of a potentially terrific story.) I cut the story to 90,000 words and told the editor he could cut it more if he had to. When I got the copy-editing back, there were dozens of places where he noted, "Needs more development," "I'd like to see more story here," to which I wrote replies like, "Yes, so would I." So, when the finished manuscript made it to Hollywood for possible film sale, everyone who read it said, "Great story; no second act." As though I didn't know.
When the book was ready we discovered the extent to which my reputation lay primarily in history, and the sales reps gave it almost no emphasis from the catalog. Presale was poor, and St. Martin's early on made the decision to print enough to cover those orders and cut it loose. I was devastated (the common experience of the vast majority of hopeful novelists) but when the reviews started coming in, my editor called to say they had misjudged the book and were going to do more for it. That turned out not to be the case; whether he lied or someone else lied to him I never knew, but in a short time he was no longer with the publisher and I got a call from his secretary soliciting my order from the remainder sale. It was an even more embittering experience than publishing TEXAS II with them. St. Martin's and I are still not speaking, but I have heard that they have gotten a somewhat better act together, and at least they had the decency to revert the rights back to me.
So for the record, if an ambitious publisher should read this, the first Final Refuge was seen by maybe thirty people. It is still a timely story, and I would love to do it in the appropriate length. I built into the story several nubs of future sequels; I still love the characters and would happily make a deal to print the full-length Final Refuge and follow with a sequel or two.
