I suspect most authors have one. The book you wrote, fell in love with, and then put it up on the shelf when it didn’t go anywhere, the ultimate distinction between literary and financial success in writing. You pull it down and dust it off from time to time, reading over the well-remembered chapters, smiling at specific dialogue or a nice turn-of-phrase, maybe even polishing it up a bit, using your growing wisdom and skill to put a little better gleam on an earlier work. Then, with a reluctant sigh, you put it back where you got it.
For me, that book is Jonah.
It was actually my second book, written back in the late 1980s, and it could best be described as a psychological thriller, “a tale of racism and madness in rural Pennsylvania”. Yes, racism. The book is about a young man – just 17 years old – raised by a white supremacist father and subjected to every form of bigotry and stereotypes and bias against Blacks. But rather than joining this racist movement, Jonah fled and struck out on his own, fighting against this hatred of Black people, struggling with a festering wound that would not heal. For the real question and issue of Jonah is can we overcome who we are raised to be, can we find the strength to turn away from the darkness and the prejudice that has been hammered into us by society, by history, by our family?
I got a few friends and acquaintances to read the manuscript, of course, my usual approach of strong-arming nice people into “read this and tell me what you think”. Mostly, they didn’t like it. While Jonah is generally a sympathetic protagonist struggling against an ugly darkness, the subject of racism – including repeated use of the N-word – was just a little too distasteful. One reader compared it to a bowel movement, necessary, even important, but just too ugly.
At least one literary agent saw value in the work, however. Undaunted by criticism and filled with passion for the sound of my own voice, I sent it out to an array of literary agents, collecting dozens of standardized rejection letters before I came across one who believed enough in the work to take on an unpublished author. She signed me to a deal and began distributing the book to editors throughout the publishing world, and we consistently received the same reply: book is really well done, doesn’t fit our current needs, best of luck elsewhere. Being new to the industry, I figured these were just the standard polite phrases when they turned down a project, but my agent assured me, these are not “nice people”. They live by honesty and don’t have time for hurt feelings. If they say the writing is good, they mean it. But after two years of making the rounds, we finally pulled the book and set it aside.
That was 1991. I had already moved on to another work set in the off-Broadway theater entitled Stages, which had decidedly more glamor than a bowel movement but lacked Jonah’s fire and intensity. The book (like the great majority of manuscripts) never even found an agent. It was at this point that I started writing The Paladin Trilogy, redirecting my creative energies towards “something I know” like sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and my attempts at serious literary novels were set aside.
Well, now it’s 2025 (nearly 2026), and I’m older, wiser, and retired. One afternoon when I was trying to inject some sensible order into my writing files, I came across Jonah again, and of course, I couldn’t resist reading some of it, just the first couple chapters, just to see how I’d left it. I read the whole book (93,000 words, 350 pages) in 2 days. It is the most constantly rewritten and carefully polished of all my books, and it shows through in this final version. Yes, it has the clumsiness of an early novel, and yes, there were chapters that made me wince (and want to immediately edit), but it had that old passion, the fire that kept me returning to it even after everyone had turned it down. My disfigured, rejected, reviled, and beautiful child.
So, what do I do with Jonah, with this lost manuscript? Racism is as real and ugly in 2025 as it was in 1988. And as it will be in 2040 and beyond. I feel it still has value. The book helped me come to terms with my own inherent racism: a white man of my generation with my background cannot help but be racist. However, I can make two claims that lessen the stain of racism that I bear. I am less prejudiced than my parents were, and my children are less prejudiced than I am. That may be the most we can reasonably hope to achieve. And the second? I can still smile with real warmth when I see a Black baby. Our children are our common heritage and our common hope.
So, what do you think I should do with Jonah? Publish it on Amazon – possibly under a pseudonym – so that I can take comfort that it’s out there? Send it out to literary agents as I tried before – as it was written in 1988, it now has the additional appeal of being a recent historical novel – so I can at least say I gave it another shot? There are even some literary contests that are looking for unpublished works. Should I send it off to them to see if it can catch a literary prize that would give it the momentum it needs? To free it from the inherent prejudice it has suffered?
Or put it back up on the shelf where it can accumulate more dust until the next time I pull it down for a commemorative readthrough?
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