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Dispatch 4

It’s here!

Introducing the cover art for Hypocrite’s Row.

Launch set for Feb. 10.

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Hypocrite's Row

The Adventures of Nate Moran
Q&A with Eliot K

What are the sources for Nate’s Adventures?
Confession: Pretty much every storyline or event is inspired by, based on, or flat-out stolen from actual events, and from history articles written by someone who cannot sue me for plagiarism: Me! In fiction, the author must create an entire world, characters, backstories, plotlines, and so on. But he also GETS TO do those things. In non-fiction, the events and people involved have done a lot of your work for you. In historical fiction, such as the Nate Moran novels, I’ve had both luxuries.

Do you have a publicist/agent?
Even for the big publishers, marketing budgets are way down. Most writers have to mostly do their own work. So I am my own publicist. As for literary agents, I don’t have one. Not that I didn’t try! Most publishers are too swamped to deal with unsolicited inquiries, so they don’t consider a project unless an agent submitted it. But agents themselves can get dozens of inquiries a day. Each of those, of course, is a book. It’s physically impossible for agents to read through each. one At best, they get through some of one and have to make a judgment call. That’s tough. I’ve heard agents talk about the big one that got away or the sure hit that turned out to be a costly flop. I was not offended by any of my rejections. In the end, I went with Level Best, one of the few publishers which will consider a manuscript without an agent attached. They took a chance on me, and I am grateful.

When did you start writing?
Legend – mostly disproved, sadly -- attributes to the legendary Dorothy Parker, “I hate to write, but I love having written.” That isn’t me. I love the whole process. Turning a phrase and then admiring what I’d done. What a rush.
My mother says I read at age 3. Naturally, I was heavily influenced by being in the household of a professional journalist. But my mother steered me early on. I wrote for the junior high newspaper and then for my high school paper. But as college loomed, I still wasn’t sure if writing was what I wanted to do for a living.
At the University of Florida, I decided I did not want to follow Dad into daily journalism. I was worried about living in his shadow. Plus, anyone with a Jewish mother must seriously pursue the law or medicine or else be disowned. I went for law. Just for yucks, I decided to make journalism my undergraduate field of study. And I found that I did like writing. Boy, did I. Not just the thrill of seeing a story come to life even as I typed, but also the emotional high of people telling me that something I wrote moved them to ponder, laugh or even cry.
In 1977, it snowed all the way to Miami. Naturally that's what everyone remembers about that winter. But it also was one of Florida's coldest, and longest lingering. In a place that doesn't handle cold well. One day, I was in journalism class and noticed no one was listening to the droning teacher. Their attention had been drawn to the window. Outside, sprinklers had come on. After weeks of brown, the world was returning to life. North Central Florida’s grass again was turning green. I sat down and wrote about it. Not for class. Just to write. I showed the essay to my roommate, Rich Ellis, still a dear friend decades later. He said, "Tell me again why you shouldn't be a writer."
I sat for the law school entrance exams and was accepted to the University of Florida school of law. Hooray! Mom: I did it! Only then, freed from the pursuit, was I able to decide whether this was something I really wanted. And I soon realized my friends were right. I took a pass on law school. And embarked on a career in what I should have been doing all along.

Why did you go into daily journalism first instead of novels?
Easy. I’d have starved.
People such as Steven King and J.K. Rowling have earned millions. For the more typical author, writing is more of a hobby. Not by choice. Studies have said only one in eight authors earns more than $100,000 from publishing. In a 2022 survey of 5,699 published authors, median gross pre-tax income from books was $2,000. A year.
Even coming out of college, I toyed with novels and screenplays, but was interrupted regularly by low gas gauges, mostly-empty refrigerators and pending rent notices. So I set aside, for the moment, my dream and pursued a career in daily journalism. I'm convinced that was a good thing in the long run. Viewing my early writing shows me that it has, well, improved dramatically since then. I estimated that just in my 33-plus years at the Palm Beach Post, I wrote 14,000 stories! And we know the magic to better writing is to write. So when it came to attacking fiction, I was seasoned.

Wasn’t your dad also a writer?
When people ask me this at talks, I say, “No. I was also a writer.” My dad died at 90 in September 2023. He had been out of the daily newspaper business for 33 years, nearly as long as the four decades he’d been in it. But he was a great writer up to the day he died. And I learned from that. Many kids rebel against their parents, then end up doing the same thing. My dad was a newsman and a writer and a historian. So there you go.