The Books Under the Bed

Liz Flaherty

The Growing Season was my first completed manuscript. It had more points of view in it than you could shake a stick at and enough characters to populate a small town. It was followed by Sycamore Summer and The Boarding House, and there may have been one or two others in there. There were more Chapter Ones than I can even begin to remember, stories with beginnings and endings, but no middles to hold them up. These are my under-the-bed manuscripts, largely gone because they were saved on discs that became corrupt. There may be paper copies somewhere, but I doubt it.

And that’s okay. The things I gleaned from them—teenagers as people instead of caricatures, settings as characters unto themselves, the entire backstory for One More Summer, a pastor named Deac Rivers—will live on as long as my published books can be found. The parts that shouldn’t live on―head-hopping extraordinaire, omniscient POV, telling instead of showing, every stereotype known to publishing—well, they don’t live on. Sometimes corrupted files are a good thing.

I know some writers’ first stories end up as their first books and although I’m happy for those talented authors, I’m glad I’m not one of them. In the first place, because I think maybe (I’m whispering here) I don’t have the kind of talent that was going to shine right out of the gate, and in the second place because those first unpublished and mostly forgotten stories gave birth to my writing voice.

My next Heartwarming, The Happiness Pact (new title), will be a December release. I’m so excited, and I think maybe there’s a scene idea in it that may have come from the 1990s. I’m not sure about that, though—let me check under the bed.

Helen DePrima

I’ll lay good money that most writers have “a book under the bed”, or a manuscript on a closet shelf, an early project that somehow never saw the light of day. I recently found a short story I wrote more than forty years ago, before moving from Colorado to New Hampshire. Now it read as a pretty amateurish effort, but there’s a seed of something that might become a novel, the kind of romance I’ve learned to write.

The first book in which I wrote The End was a mystery set in the world of Thoroughbred racing, a milieu I grew up with in Louisville. I was damn proud of it and sent off queries in all high hopes to agents. Lots of agents. Some responded with form letters: Thanks for your submission but it’s not quite right for us. One sent a mimeographed rejection not much bigger than the slip in a fortune cookie – who the heck uses mimeograph these days? A few offered specific comments – love your voice and your characters, but the plot is weak. One agent at a high-end writers’ conference looked over her half-glasses and said, “Dick Francis – who cares?” In front of 200 attendees.

Deep sigh, under the bed it went. Now I may resurrect those characters and that locale, but with a better understanding of what might comprise a stronger plot. I hope.

The other end of the spectrum is the book that remains unwritten, the idea that buzzes like a pesky mosquito in a darkened bedroom, impossible to ignore. The Maine coast (a character in its own right) a young widow, a surly lobsterman with a murky past . . . Let the action begin, one of these days.

Don't miss Helen's latest Heartwarming, Luke's Ride, which thankfully never went under her bed!

The time has come for him to cowboy up… 

He's spent fifteen years at the rodeo, protecting riders when they hit the dirt. But what exactly is a bullfighter after a bull takes him down in the arena and lands him in a wheelchair? That's what Luke Cameron's still struggling to figure out. And if Katie Garrison, in the middle of a controversial divorce, can help him find a new kind of life…well…he's not one to turn her down! But she's still a married woman and her husband isn't going to let her go without a fight. Besides, Luke may never walk again. What kind of life can he give a woman like Katie?