MY FIRST NOVEL: 'THE MENTOR'S GIFT'

In 1997 I was required to take an elective class in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master’s degree I was working on at Towson University. I have always been a writer, I have always dreamed of someday writing a novel, and I love to read as much as I love to do almost anything else, so I enrolled in a class for short story writers. It would become my first experience with a writers group and it would teach me the value of criticism in particular criticism from my writing peers.

One of the short stories I submitted in that class was The Mentor’s Gift. Both the teacher and my class mates enjoyed the story but they told me it really wasn’t a short story – it was a novel, and they encouraged me to develop the characters and story line.

In December of 1998, Jill (my long-term assistant and partner in magic) and I gave our final performance as a team. In the spring of 1999, she married and I knew that a wonderful working relationship was over. Without the constant pressure of an illusion show occupying my time, I decided to devote my creative attention to The Mentor’s Gift.

After working the day job, I devoted every evening and some weekends to the first draft. The book flowed. As I wrote it I experienced every emotion as if the events were actually happening to me. It was as if someone else were writing it.

The first draft was complete within a couple of years, and then the hard work really began. I sent it to some professional editors for critique and I discovered to my astonishment that I had made some basic blunders that would require a complete re-write of my precious story. Before all was said and done, The Mentor’s Gift would experience no less than five complete re-writes proving to me the old Truman Capote saying that, “good writing is re-writing.”

When I thought it was ready, I submitted The Mentor’s Gift to no less than 50 publishers, 30 agents, and I also entered it in the Romance Writers of America annual contest. Many of the publishers liked it and took the time to write expressing thoughts or opinions about the manuscript. Agents were not so kind but I knew the agent mentality from my years at work in the magic biz. In short, agents can negotiate better deals for an artist than an artist can secure for him or her self but they are generally not interested in new or untested talent.

The problem with The Mentor’s Gift, from a marketing point of view, was that it was not enough of a romance to interest publishers that publish only romance and it was too much of a romance to interest literary publishers. In addition, the main character was a goth magician—not at all a mainstream interest.

Fortunately, the publishing industry, like the music industry, has been revolutionized in the last five years. Special interest groups are seeing more opportunities now than ever and I was able to secure a publishing arrangement for my much treasured novel.

I submitted the book for publication in August not knowing the amount of work the publisher would still require of me to get the book into print. We went back and forth, negotiating and rewriting. Then one evening in November, after my wife and I returned from a lovely dinner with some much loved friends, I found a message from the publisher with some art attached—it was the cover design for The Mentor’s Gift. It may sound like a cliché but it literally took my breath away and for the first time since I first dreamed of writing at the age of eight, I knew my dream would come true.

It is a wonderful thing when dreams come true. Life can be very hard and cruel but our dreams can lift us above that cruelty to give us a new perspective. Without dreams we die. To give up on a dream is to give up on life itself. But dreams were never meant to be only wished for. A dream is a gift from God but the hard work it takes to make a dream come true is our gift to Him.

I felt God’s pleasure as I looked at that cover as I had never experienced it before.

My life will never be the same again because of The Mentor’s Gift. The book is available, as they say, “wherever fine books are sold.” If you enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it then you are in for a wonderful experience.

Many blessings to you,
David