Mike Royko, the Genesis of a Writer (Part Two)
The plane lands on January 3rd, 1993, and it’s cold. I don’t speak the language and the person I’m supposed to meet suddenly can’t put me up. Not the best of vibes. A cab drops me off the Hotel Central, where I and my volumnous luggage settle in to a postage-stamp size room at fifty bucks a night.
I find an English-speaking realty company, expecting to be pretty well hosed, and they show me three flats; one that’s way too expensive, one that’s a rat hole, and the one they set me up to take, which I can afford. Turns out I stay there for five years, so I was really lucky. I have angels, and they have been there for me more often through my lifetime than I care to admit.
My first odd coincidence.
On my second night in town, it’s midnight and I’m crossing the 600 year old Charles Bridge, absolutely no one in sight, but snowing and quite beautiful. A stranger walks toward me, and as he becomes distinguishable, it turns out to be a friend of mine from Chicago. How weird is that? Vibes are improving. We chat, but he’s leaving in the morning for Berlin, so no ‘new buddy who can show me the ropes.’
A second odd experience. I told you, I have angels.
The following Sunday, I’m having dinner in a totally empty front dining room at Radost, a kinda cool joint that has English menus and a waiter who I can also speak to. Things are looking up.
A tall guy walks in, looks around and asks if he can join me. “Bruce Damer,” he announces, reaching out his hand. Turns out he’s a Canadian computer programmer, working in Prague. “You going to the poetry reading, downstairs?” he asks. “Don’t know,” I reply, wondering just what a ‘poetry reading’ is. “C’mon along, you’ll like it, called BeefStew, and it’s all English-speaking writers. They read their stuff here every Sunday night.”
And, thus, I meet my tribe.
They’re great, mostly back-packing their way through Europe, and the vibes just keep improving. After it’s over, Bruce and I have a drink at the bar upstairs, and I’m pretty much glowing in the company of new-found friends. “What’re you working on now?” he asks. “Nothing at the moment, just getting settled.” “Write me a future-oriented novel, based on technology.” “Okay, you’re on,” says me.
That year is a blur. Jeff, a BeefStew connection, gets me a job where he works, answering the night phones three days a week, at nine bucks an hour, a fortune over here. Jason, another writer, has a vintage Java motorbike and in the spring I take it across the Alps down to Vente Milia to see Italian friends I knew from Chicago. I write the story of that trip, send it off to American Motorcyclist and they buy it for $500.
I’m a writer. This is how it works. I write and people pay me.
Late that summer I finish EVOKE, Bruce’s 360 page futurist novel, and it’s good. I know it’s good. I’ve read bits of it at BeefStew, I’m getting used to Prague, the most beautiful city in Europe, and my friends praise my book. I won’t fail at this and go back, tail between legs.
In those days, the drill was to package a synopsis and three chapters, then send it off to an agent to represent you. Publishers won’t look at your work without an agent. I did that. Then I did it 73 more times, and wonder where the magic went. The replies I do get, and they are only one out of ten, are polite enough, “Nicely written and an interesting slant, but not exactly what we’re looking for right now.”
I came across a book that made me feel better, but not all that much.
"Rotten Rejections: A Literary Companion," is a collection of excerpts from rejection letters sent by publishers to authors of books that later became best-sellers or literary classics. J.K. Rowling, the first author to ever become a billionaire for their work, was finally accepted by Bloomsbury, who advised Rowling to “get a day job, as they didn’t think she’d make much money from children’s books!”
George Orwell’s, Animal Farm “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” William Golding’s Lord of the Flies “An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.” Stephen King’s Carrie “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.” My books are not in that class, but they got better rejection letters.
I do not know, but I am told that agents hire Columbia first year lit students, and send them to the basement with orders to not send more than one in a hundred manuscripts upstairs. It's estimated that hundreds of thousands of manuscripts are submitted to publishers and literary agents in the U.S. each year. The odds do not run in authors’ favor.
So, I did what any logical wordsmith would do, I self-published, where the platforms only see thousands of new books published daily.
Mike Royko never had to deal with that, but we no longer really know his story, because he’s gone now. But I am still here, turning 90 in two months, having lived in all or part of ten decades.
That past history flavors my three novels, two non-fiction books, three collections of poetry, and ten volumes of essays. It was always my hope to hitch a ride on a newspaper, writing a couple political/social columns a week for pocket-change to augment my social security, but there’s more firing than hiring in that industry these days.
A patron would be nice. Is patronage done any more?
Probably not, all those billionaires and not a patron in sight.
Anyway, the rest of my three decades in Prague is nothing but stories, but I’ve kept you too long already.
If you’re interested in my books, drive over to jim-freeman.com on the internet and mosey around a bit. You might find something worth your while, and we’d both find value in that.
Cheers…and all the best, in this very complicated world