Chris Grabenstein writes:
My first book, Tilt-A-Whirl, is actually my fourth.
That is, it was the fourth manuscript for a novel I had written – all four of which were written after completing seven screenplays in eighteen months. In fact, it was a screenplay (The Legend of Pumpkin Nelligan), one that picked up a couple screenwriting awards, if no production deals, that landed me my first agent who called to tell me how much he liked the script but he had decided New York was the wrong market for selling screenplays so he was moving on to representing fiction writers only and if I ever wrote a book he would be happy to read it.
Fortunately, I just had.
I had come to the same conclusion.
New York is no place for a rookie screenwriter over 21. Screenwriters, except William Goldman, need to be in L.A. But I didn’t want to move to L.A. because I had been there about six times a year for over fifteen years filming commercials. I did not want to do lunch -- at least not in any kind of permanent, you-can’t-go-home-to-where-the-leaves-change-colors, sort of way.
That fall and early winter, I had completed the manuscript for a creepy thriller called The Prayer Circle, a story which kept several of my friends/readers up late at night, furiously flipping pages when they should have been wrapping their children’s Christmas presents. The agent shopped The Prayer Circle around town. Everybody loved it. Nobody bought it. Creepy horror thrillers, I ultimately discovered, are tough sells.
So, I wrote another novel. The Adman. And then another: The Crossroads.
I took classes, attended seminars, and read all I could about writing, even though writing was something I had been doing since I was about twelve and they needed someone to handle the funny gossip stuff for the Junior High newspaper.
I had written hundreds, no thousands of commercials (for every one you see on TV, there are at least 99 stacked behind a copy writer’s door that the client killed). I had written for The Muppets. I had even written a made-for-TV Christmas movie that still shows up on the Hallmark Channel every year.
But, my agent wondered, could I write a Series Character?
Apparently, some of the houses that passed on The Prayer Circle and the rest did so because, even though they loved the writing, they didn’t know what the sequels would be. Neither did I. All had been written as stand-alones. (But, being a true adman, if they want sequels – I’ll do them!)
And so I set out to create my first Series.
Fortunately, I already had a character roaming around in my imagination: an amalgam of men I had met. Firemen. Former soldiers. Men who somehow kept their sense of honesty and integrity in a world that really didn’t seem to value either any more; a world where good soldiers were sent off to fight a war based on bad lies.
John Ceepak, the cop who will not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate those who do, was born.
As it turns out, the editor who ultimately bought Tilt-A-Whirl had initially read and loved The Prayer Circle but was more interested in publishing a new mystery series.
Therefore, in a weird way, my first book is indeed my fourth – but only because of my first.
Chris Grabenstein spent several years at the nation's top ad agencies. He also worked with Bruce Willis (among others) in some of New York's most acclaimed improvisational comedy troupes. He currently lives in New York City. Tilt-A-Whirl is his first novel.
