Article: The call came while I...

The call came while I was at my day job, eating lunch at my desk: The negotiations were done, and Little, Brown would be publishing my collection of short stories, Dead Boys. Twenty years of hard, lonely work had finally paid off.

I grew up in a working-class family in California's Central Valley and became a voracious reader at an early age. I also wrote constantly, churning out stories and plays. After attending the University of Southern California on a scholarship, I settled into the first of series of jobs in magazine and book publishing and got serious about writing.

After work, I toiled on screenplays, a novel and the odd short story. Going year after year without selling anything shattered any youthful notions I had of being some kind of literary genius, but lying on the couch with a notebook and a pen became one of my few good habits, so I persevered.

In 1991, at 30 years of age and still unpublished, I began to work solely on short stories, deciding that if writing was going to be just a hobby, I might as well devote myself to the form I enjoyed most, even if it was the least commercial. By then writing was in my blood. I worked two hours a night, four nights a week, distilling all the wild, tragic and funny things I'd seen, experienced and heard about into stories that cut so close to the bone that sometimes they scared me.

When I finished something, I'd send it out to a journal and wait three months for a response because I'd read somewhere that simultaneous submissions were frowned upon. Every time a story was returned, I'd tear it down and rebuild it. The stories in Dead Boys were rejected many times, so I had a lot of opportunities to refine them, and in this way I finally managed to hammer out a style that appealed to editors and readers.

Then, in 1994, a miracle: New Delta Review accepted one of my stories. And it's true what they say: After you publish one, it's easier to publish others. My work began to appear regularly in journals. Well, perhaps regularly is too strong a word. It was slow going. With my day jobs and all, it could take me six months to write a 6,000-word piece.

Eventually, an agent contacted me after seeing a story in Georgia Review. He took me on as a client, and I signed with Little, Brown at the beginning of 2006, got that phone call at work and shouted so loud that people poked their heads into my office to see what was up.

So here I am now, writing full-time, finishing a novel, loving life. A guy could get used to this. And if it all falls apart and I end up copyediting corporate propaganda by day and writing by night again, I can deal with that, too, two hours a night, four nights a week, as regular as a heartbeat, as natural as breathing.

Copyright © 2007 Richard Lange