Erasing Personal History

 By Robert Weibezahl

 A few weekends ago I was in the old neighborhood and thought it would be fun to show my eleven-year-old daughter the apartment I lived in when I first moved to Los Angeles twenty-one years ago. It was gone. In its place stood an outsized condo complex of vaguely Moorish design.

Anyone who has lived in L.A. for any amount of time (lets say, at least three years) is probably not surprised by this topographical transformation. This city, like its inhabitants, has an implacable reputation for reinventing itself. More than one building that has gone up during my time here has already come down, replaced by something newer, larger, hipper if not necessarily better. LACMA alone has been reconfigured more times than a certain pop star's facial features.

Proponents of this kind of progress will tell you that it keeps the city exciting, moving forward. We are a city that needs more housing, they say. These assertions may be true. I will be the first to admit that much (though not all) of what is torn down has little value from the standpoint of architectural preservation. My tiny over-a-garage apartment that is no more had all the charm of a 1950s roadside motel. Besides, the little slice of Brentwood-adjacent, where it had managed to hold on longer than I had expected, had long before lost what little charm it had about the time they tore down the neighborhood Ralphs and built a hideous brown high-rise monolith in its place.

Quite by coincidence, the same weekend we discovered the apartment had been razed, my daughter showed me Google Earth. As I zoomed in on my hometown back east like some vertiginous Luftwaffe gunner, I found the roofline of the first house I lived in as a child, only slightly altered by the addition of a room out back. There, in the yard of the house across the street, the neighbors swimming pool where I idled away many a summer hour was still visible. Scanning a little to the west, there was the Catholic grammar school where I learned the catechism, lived through the implementation of Vatican II, and witnessed the revolutionary rise in the nuns' hemlines. My high school was still on the edge of town, nestled among houses once occupied by the families of my now scattered classmates. One town closer to the city, I found my grandmother's house, just around the corner from another house where my father was born. Little more than the greenery seems to have changed.

Could I track down these same kinds of memories if I had grown up in Los Angeles? I have no way of knowing. I do know that the numerical address of that phantom apartment near University High doesn't even exist anymore, so I couldn't google it even if I wished. Could I just accept this urge for the "new" as a Western phenomenon, like sagebrush and earthquakes? Perhaps yes, if it weren't for the fact that on recent family trips to San Francisco and Albuquerque, we ate at restaurants my wife frequented as a student in those cities almost three decades ago.

My daughter is a native Angeleno. Obviously, she will never know that Los Angeles that I have known. Things change. In many ways, that is not a bad thing. But twenty years from now, will she recognize the city of her youth?

The most precious or at least the most interesting part of a city's history is made up of the individual histories of those who live there. Perhaps I feel this way because I am originally from the shabby east coast, where the idea of progress is a new sign at the Texaco, but I suspect I am not alone in believing that our psychic connection to whatever place we call home is diminished when its touchstones disappear, even if those touchstones are nothing more than the local pizzeria and car wash. I feel my personal history being erased whenever a building is razed, or a restaurant closes, or another Mom-and-Pop store goes under. And each time, a small piece of L.A.'s larger history is also brushed away with the dust left behind by that remorseless eraser we call progress.

Copyright 2006 Robert Weibezahl

This article was first published in the  Los Angeles Daily News, November 27, 2006. It may not be reprinted or distributed in any form without written permission from the author.

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Its Not Always Who You Know

 by Robert Weibezahl

I'm not sure who first said, "It's not what you know, it's who you know," but I am living proof that this old saw is not always true. You'd think that toiling on and off in the publishing business for twenty years would give you the upper hand when it comes time to write and sell that first novel, wouldn't you? Think again.

 My sordid tale begins in the fall of 1991. Having just returned to Los Angeles from a summer working on a movie in Chicago, I was, as was the case more often than not, "between jobs." I had been writing for years, but had never sold any fiction. Then, in a flash of inspiration the likes of which can only occur while stuck in traffic on a California freeway, a character came to me, all but fully formed. His name was Billy Winnetka, he was a screenwriter, and he was going to solve a murder. Whose? Why a movie producer's, of course (anyone who has worked in Hollywood for more than a week will understand this choice of victim).

 The story poured out of me as none of my many earlier attempts at fiction had. Within a few months I had finished the first draft, and I asked some trusted readers, including a 4-time published mystery author, to give it a look. Mostly positive feedback, so I set to work on revisions. About a year after beginning, I had what I thought was a publishable book.

It was time to get the manuscript into the right hands and wait for an offer. Now even in those more youthful times I was not naive, but I did think I had an edge. After all, before moving to L.A., I had worked as a publicist at two major New York publishing houses, so I "knew" some people. I mustered my courage and called Sue Grafton's editor, who had always praised the press releases I had written for her books. She couldn't have been more gracious, but admitted that Sue was the only mystery author she edited, and she wasn't looking for more. Another venerable editor I knew whose personal imprint published the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Muriel Spark admitted he knew nothing about "detective fiction." The editor I knew best, who had first published Maureen Tan, Alice Hoffman, and Lee Smith, kindly passed my manuscript on to her house's mystery editor, who rejected it. The same happened when a friend who was the publicity director at another major publisher passed it to their mystery guy.

So I hadn't dazzled the publishing world (though I did get some personal rejection letters, often with a few lines of invaluable feedback). No one needed to hit me over the head with a 2-by-4.  I did some extensive revisions before beginning round two. Until then, I had circumvented the whole agent thing, but this time that seemed the wisest route.  For me, the agent-seeking process would prove akin to watching paint dry. One agent, the Manhattan neighbor of a veteran book publicist and friend, had the manuscript for more than two years (I forget whether I ever even got a formal rejection letter). Another, to whom I was referred by another client, couldn't find my manuscript for months (it turned up in a box in her garage, having survived a move from New York to New Jersey). During this time I still sent the manuscript directly to publishers who were willing to take a look. A junior editor I knew took a job at a publisher with a major mystery line, and she happily passed it on to their august editor. I never heard back; my contact moved on.

Imagine my (short-lived) delight when I found out that the mystery writer who had read and liked the book in its early stages (see paragraph 3, above) was now reading manuscripts for the independent publisher who had discovered Andrew H. Vachss and others. By coincidence, my book landed in her mailbox. She gave it a glowing readers report (she sent me a copy) and recommended it highly.  I thought there might be a deal in the offing. The publisher died not long after.

By now, six or seven years had passed since Billy Winnetka was born like Athena from the head of Zeus on the Ventura Freeway. I hoped things were changing at last when I got an agent and a book deal. Not for the novel, but for the mystery cookbook, A Taste of Murder, which Jo Grossman and I compiled. The editor who acquired the book specialized in mysteries, a surefire professional connection hungry for new material.  Until she left abruptly, under mysterious circumstances. Our new editor specialized in lifestyles, not fiction. When the cookbook came out, Jo and I plunged into a world I barely had known existed -- the world of Bouchercon and Malice Domestic and Left Coast Crime, where I befriended dozens of mystery writers and met numerous agents. Suddenly I had reviews to wave around from major metropolitan dailies, from Publishers Weekly, from the Associated Press. The cookbook was nominated for the Agatha and the Macavity. I felt I was now a bona fide member of the mystery community. My agent for A Taste of Murder, who had never sold a mystery manuscript but wanted to branch out, asked to read my novel.  Her assistant loved it. She did not.

If you've made it this far in this grimy chronicle, you may be thinking, "Clearly this book was no good. Why didnt this guy just give up?" Well, I had gotten enough positive, sometimes even glowing, feedback over the years to know that I had something. If anything, the manuscript had gotten stronger, thanks to seemingly countless revisions. Plus, during most of this period I was working freelance for publishers like HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Harcourt, writing press kits for dozen of their new books every year. I could see that my book was as good as much of what they were publishing.

Or maybe I was just stubborn.

Still, by 2003, when the follow-up cookbook, A Second Helping of Murder, was published, I had all but given up on the book, which had been renamed The Wicked and the Dead. Publishing Second Helping with a small mystery publisher had been such a pleasurable experience, though, that I approached them about the novel. Despite being a "house author," I was told I would need to go through the standard submission process, which involved sending three chapter and a synopsis -- you know the drill. I submitted and waited. And waited. After some gentle prodding, I was informed that one of their readers had absolutely loved the chapters, the other had hated them. Given the dramatic difference of opinion, they wanted to see the entire manuscript. I sent it along, then waited months to hear back. When I queried about the holdup, I was told it was due to the fact that once again two readers, entirely different from those in round one, were split -- one pro, one con. So the book would go to the editor-in-chief for the final verdict: Rejected.

Some time during the long eight months that this last publisher took to pass on my novel, I had decided that that would be the final shot, the last rejection. When it came, I was distraught, despondent, depressed -- all those D-words that every writer suffers from with brutal regularity. But I was also determined (or perhaps deluded). Not heeding my own sage counsel, I resolved to send the manuscript out one last time.  I had discovered a relatively new mystery publisher, Quiet Storm, when I'd had my first short story published in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine and had spotted their ad on the back of the magazine. I went to their website and verified they were legit, neither a vanity press, nor self-publishing, which didnt interest me. What did I have to lose? I sent an e-mail query and the publisher responded within hours saying he would be interested in seeing the novel. I sent the manuscript electronically and fewer than forty-eight hours later (I kid you not!), he sent me an email which began, "I have no idea how this got passed on. . . ." He offered me a deal. Once the paramedics revived me, I accepted.

Okay. Quiet Storm is a fledgling press, with all the inherent obstacles associated with small publishers. But they are an enthusiastic up-and-comer (their books have won a couple of major mystery awards this year) with some fine writers on their list. I'll admit that when I first sat down and started to write The Wicked and the Dead, I imagined myself with a traditional New York publisher. The vagaries of the marketplace determined that wasn't meant to be. The book is out there now, rather than spending six months sitting on yet another editor or agents unread pile or, worse, relegated to the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. And so far, it has gotten nothing but positive reviews (and not just from my mother!).

So don't necessarily believe 'em when they insist "It's not what you know, it's who you know."  It wasn't true for me. My experience suggests a better watchword to adapt might be, "If at first you don't succeed." Or better yet, "Patience is a virtue."

Copyright 2006 Robert Weibezahl

This article was first published in InSinc: The Sisters in Crime Newsletter, Vol. XIX, Number 1, March 2006. It may not be reprinted or distributed in any form without written permission from the author.