Archived Editorial for 03/12/06

Luna Lives!
from Jonathan Miller

Editor: come take a humorous trip with this author as he recounts(&, I'm sure, embellishes) some of his many adventures in the necessary evil of getting published, book signing tours & self-promotion:

Crater County, my second novel, was always Rattlesnake Lawyer's darker, & slightly seamier step-sister. I had thought that once your first novel was published, & sold out, selling the second would be easier.

I was wrong. & yet last weekend, I sold the last copy of Crater County. During the course of my journeys, the heroine, Luna Cruz, became fully alive. When the last of the first print was sold, I swear I saw... wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Luna's story
...began in Albuquerque around 1997, while I still practiced law full time. In the course of three days during a trial, I wanted to prove that I could write a character that was clearly not myself. I decided to really go for it & create a Latina, with some deep issues so I could explore some real dark “what if” questions.

I also wanted to write a sympathetic Prosecutor with a heart. In my daily criminal law practice that often seemed like fiction. I called the first draft “Three Crosses” because the alleged killer had a cross tattooed on his hand after every killing.

In real life, my client had his girlfriend's phone number tattooed on his arm, but battered her after she changed area codes rendering the tattoo obsolete. I actually used some of Luna's fictional speeches in the trial the next day, which didn't work in real life because he was quickly convicted. Still, Luna was far more fun to write than the “me” character, who I had made the villain. As I said, this time I really wanted to go dark.

In developing Luna, I wanted a strong character who didn't realize her own strength. I remembered a woman who worked-out at my gym. She became the model for Luna's triathletic physique. She indeed had a “butt worth getting disbarred for”, although I still have my law license.

I once met a woman who, like Luna, is a half-Latina prosecutor, runs track at a football school, is on the other side of a first degree felony, dates a cop, lives with her mother & also has Luna's physical stature, but we kept it strictly professional rather than literary. Reality rejected me, so perhaps that's why I created a fantasy.

A friend saw much of me in Luna — of course her insecurity & loneliness at the start of the book came from me. No writer can avoid that I guess. Yet, I also gave her a drive, a heart, & a spirit that I could only dream of. Over the course of her story, she made far worse mistakes than I ever did, yet she learned from them & ended up a better person, & a better lawyer than I would ever be. I had fallen in love with Luna, but to paraphrase Woody Allen -= she was fictional, I was Jewish. Just think what the children would be.

When I moved to Los Angeles & went to Film School, Luna came up for air. I met a guy at a party who was an accountant at Playboy Enterprises. Talk about the dream job, except for the accounting part. He said he wanted to help me out, & over lunch he glanced at the script. He liked it so much that he said he'd forward it to Playboy's film production company that now made “real” movies, well “sort of real” movies.

I had a vision of Luna portrayed by Miss August, so I spent another week or two “sexing” her. Unfortunately, she had her limits & couldn't sleep with the entire world in only 90 pages. Playboy promptly rejected the script & returned it in a plain brown envelope. The male accountant then admitted that he was actually interested in ME, & not as a writer.

Luna stayed eclipsed in LA, & I returned home to New Mexico to resume my legal career. Rattlesnake Lawyer had been published to some success in 2000, but I had to prove that I was no “one hit wonder”.

I looked at a pile of old scripts & tried to decide which one would make the transition to a novel. I remembered how easy it was to write Luna's character. I almost called the script, “Lunar Lawyer” but it just didn't sound right. Originally, she was going to be “Luna Crater”, but an agent commented that a name like that was something out of a comic book, rather than a “serious” legal thriller. She became “Cruz” because she picks up the victim's silver cross right before the big closing argument in Chapter 27.

By the way, a mythical “Crater County” received a mention in Rattlesnake Lawyer, a stand-in for Carlsbad & its caverns. I liked the alliteration immediately. Living in a crater seemed a perfect metaphor for my life at that time, barren & airless. I moved the town & put it on a freeway, a cross between Tucumcari, Moriarty, Grants & Gallup. Although in reality, it was really all of New Mexico for me at that time. As the characters often joke, there really wasn't a crater in the county, it was only a state of mind.

I started the novel in December 2002, as I worked as a disgruntled lawyer handling traffic tickets for disgruntled truck drivers. Let's just say I was low man on a pretty low totem pole. I waited to hear from a new & more lucrative legal job that would, ironically, pay off my brutal film school debts.

I vowed I'd stop writing the novel the instant I got an offer for a “real” job. Unfortunately, no one offered me anything, gruntled or otherwise. I now had 75,000 words that had a beginning, a middle & an ALMOST end, but I didn't quite like it. On New Year's Eve, I realized that I had to make Luna a true heroine — she had to go & rescue her love from the killer, rather than vice versa.

By early January 2003, I'd typed THE END. In case you're wondering, I did de-sex Luna's character a bit from the Playboy version, so this time she kept her bikini on in the hot tub. Other than that, Luna was still the character I had created over the span of three days.

When I'd finished Crater County, the novel, I signed with a new agent, who sounded enthused about the project because of all the success I'd had selling Rattlesnake Lawyer. It would be easier this time, right?

There was to be no Luna landing in all of 2003, so I decided to agent myself & sent Luna out on her own. I might as well have sent the submission to a PO box on Pluto. The response was existentially brutal. George Stein of Barbed Wire Press did not want to publish the book even if I paid him a couple of grand for the privilege. He said something along the lines of no one wanted to read about a depressed lawyer, it wasn't realistic. A reader at a New York mega-agency bluntly stated that I obviously had no idea whatsoever about the legal system. I actually took that criticism to heart & added a few paragraphs of legal gobbledy-gook before I submitted it again.

Finally I met a woman during the Border Book Festival who worked at the University of New Mexico Press, & requested that I send her the manuscript. Two weeks later, I e-mailed her asking about the status of my ms. She subsequently e-mailed her boss, telling him that he didn't even have to read the submission because she had seen my cable access show (The Rattlesnake Review Movie Critic Show). She called me all sorts of names, & mentioned that my cable show was a total embarrassment. Therefore, I probably couldn't write one lick.

How do I know this? She accidentally cc-ed me a copy of her e-mail. I was devastated. I let her know of her mistake & said that “everything was cool” & I appreciated her honesty.

Everything was cool? I was heartbroken & felt like she'd used my manuscript as toilet paper. I not only felt bad for myself, but also for Luna. The editor later apologized, but UNM Press did not publish me. I didn't cheer for the Lobos for a year after that.

The day after I received UNM's rejection, my existing publisher agreed to print Crater County, & not ask for any money. It was Luna's last chance for life. He also said he'd publish the paperback of Rattlesnake Lawyer & Amarillo in August, my non-fiction collection about the writer's life on the road. Luna would now have a family.

George Eliot (Mary Evans 1819-80), author of Middlemarch & others, wrote “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

It was time for Luna to get out of the silence — she had a body, she now needed a face. I had originally used a beautiful neighbor as the model for the cover & I paid her fifty bucks to pose in front of three crosses in the cemetery next to our complex. With her dark hair & big eyes, she was ALMOST Luna, but not quite. My neighbor was a mysterious half-Asian woman with a secret. I would eventually move in with her. That will be my next book, of course.

My editor, Lisa Wysocky, did an excellent job turning my crazed writings into something resembling English. I asked Amy Turner, a very talented graphic artist, to design the cover. After many attempts we were lucky to find a woman's head out of a directory who looked vaguely like a cross between Penelope Cruz & Selma Hayek. She had a Mona Lisa smile & her eyes were cast downward as if looking at a crime scene. I knew in that instant, she was Luna, at least in spirit. I have made it a point not to learn the model's name. I found what I thought was a picture of Shiprock in Western New Mexico to be the backdrop, but people pointed out it was Monument Valley in Utah or Arizona. Don't tell anyone.

I had lost the law job because of their concerns I was spending too much time on my books. I now had a struggling solo practice. I impatiently pushed my publisher, & Crater County came out in trade paperback in March 2004, along with Rattlesnake Lawyer & Amarillo in August in the same week. I took three very deep breaths. Unfortunately, in space, no one can hear you scream, especially at the bottom of a crater.

I did not received a single review, not from the Albuquerque Journal, Tribune, Weekly Alibi or even Crosswinds. I only had a write-up in the widely read Cibola County Beacon in Grants, New Mexico which mentioned that Luna, like many athletes, totally shaved her lower body. I don't remember anything else about the review.

I did get a nice write-up a few weeks later on page W-4 of the west side edition of the Albuquerque Journal. I did not receive any radio coverage. I also had no television interviews, other than a group panel discussing the “male perspective on romance” on someone else's cable access show. I did run two boxed one-inch ads in the Bar Bulletin, but even I knew that lawyers don't read fiction — they only write it. I had hoped that the independent book stores would support a struggling local writer, but not a single one in New Mexico gave Luna a chance. She wasn't hip enough or independent enough, whatever. Luna was the girl that no one asked to prom.

I'd worry about that later. My first book signing for Crater Country & its half-sisters came at the Second Judicial District Court, well, not actually in the court, but in the small restaurant on the first floor. The signing went surprisingly well, even though I didn't want to use the hard sell on judges with whom I had pending cases. It was clear that Luna was outselling her siblings, although I had to give them attention as well, cutting into her total sales.

I concentrated on those horrible chains that you always complain about — Borders, Barnes & Noble, & Hastings, which was primarily a movie & music place, but I managed to convince the family renting a Disney flick to try out Luna. My success continued at the other stores as well. Once I kicked ass at Barnes, I was soon invited to sign at the next Noble. The independent stores might have hated Luna, but the independent-thinking folks at the NM Book Co-op gave her a home during the Christmas season & she thrived there.

It was strange, but I soon found friends for Luna. Women over forty, especially women of color, sometimes picked the book up & bought it before I even began my pitch. Two judicial secretaries read it overnight & loved it. I knew I had something, I just had to get the word out. Ironically, born-again Christians loved the book, when I told them that Luna does have redemption in the end. They liked the fact that her name was Luna Cruz. & lesbians loved her as well, although they said she wasn't sexy enough.

I did get my pitch down to a few good words: Luna falls in love with the defense lawyer for the three crosses killer, but more people start dying, & the lawyer starts getting tattoed crosses of his own. Will she win the case, or will she become the final cross? I would then show a “three crosses tattoo” that I'd scribbled in on my hand. Sometimes I just asked strangers if they've ever been in love with someone they thought was a criminal? That alone was good enough for at least one sale a night, especially in bookstores in the shadier neighborhoods.

Then I started getting fan mail from readers, saying how much they loved the book & the character. Luna now belonged to others, not just to me.

I toured relentlessly again through an entire solar system of book stores & festivals — Amarillo, Boulder, Bullhead City, Chicago, Flagstaff, Las Cruces, Los Angeles, Lubbock, New York, Phoenix, Pueblo, San Antonio, Santa Fe, & Tucson. Fatigue was a factor, as I carried this 107 pound woman on my back. I had to pull off the road several times with pulled muscles, & nearly couldn't walk in the Wagon Mound in New Mexico.

The money situation was dire. My dad always asked me if I got to keep the money. In those situations, I didn't. Sometimes stores ordered the books directly through the distributor. Other times, I had to order the books myself at cost, & then sell them through the stores & get to keep the costs. Thus I received zero dollars a book. & my solo practice was not flourishing either, especially as I wandered the courthouse trying to sell my books during docket calls rather than trying to solicit clients.

That was the funny part. I figured if I sold the books out, the money would come, although I reminded myself, it wasn't about money. But then, I did need new glasses & I had a few cavities that weren't covered by dental insurance, so I started pressuring my publisher. He said we'd talk AFTER I sold out the book.

I didn't think about the money & just kept pushing. During the election season, I did a red store/blue store tour — Amarillo & Santa Fe back-to-back. I sold the same amount of books to the blue liberals as I did to the red conservatives. Luna could bring the country together if people would just give her a chance.

My worst signing was in Phoenix at some sort of self-publishing conference. Aspiring self-published authors don't like to support other writers, especially non-self published ones. I sold only one copy to a very tall WNBA player pitching her memoir. She actually asked for a discount, which meant I sold the book at a loss. l left a day early, feeling totally burned.

I had thought I'd salvaged the Phoenix trip when a reviewer for a science fiction/fantasy site called the Dragon Page asked for a review copy as we hung out in the utterly deserted exhibit hall. Well, I used my charisma to convince him to ask for it. Needless to say when the review came out a few weeks later, the Dragon hated it. I knew I was in trouble when the reviewer practically opened with his hatred for all thrillers that didn't involve either dungeons, dragons or Darth Vader. He didn't totally hate it. He said I would become a great writer someday, but I wasn't there yet. The Dragon Page did publish a funny story I wrote about skipping out of work to see a Star Wars movie, & that took away a bit of the sting.

Yet I rose from the ashes & was back on track the next weekend when I went up to Santa Fe, or was it Santa Rosa? If there were people in the stores, they bought the books. I now hold the store records in places I'd never heard of. During one Wild West Texas weekend I sold 115. I almost treated myself to the 72 ounce steak at the famed Big Texan, but instead confined my self to pay-per-view at the Red Roof Inn.

I stayed in a youth hostel in Harlem, New York, during the big Book Expo America, but the worst lodging was in Lordsburg, New Mexico where I fell asleep on the way to Tucson. The best sex ever occurred in Room 6 of the Sands Motel. Unfortunately, I was in Room 7.

Still, I kept moving, except for once. In Apocalypse Now, a sailor warns Martin Sheen to “never get off the boat.” I got off the boat when I met a beautiful blonde at a signing in an out-of-the way store in Albuquerque. I actually stopped my signing to talk with her for an hour & left her my e-mail. She turned out to be someone else's stalker & the basis for a whole 'nother novel. I haven't left the boat at a signing since then.

Crater County did make the Southwestern Books of the Year Master List put out by the Tucson Public Library. They said it was “Mildly entertaining but needed character development.” Ouch! I'd hate to see what they said about the books that DIDN'T make their list. I constantly told prospective buyers about the “Master List”, & omitted to mention the “mildly” part.

There were days out on the road, when I felt like Willy Loman, & this would be the death of me, & yet, every few days I would receive an e-mail from someone who had read the book & loved it. That's what kept me going. Then more people wrote. & more. I also had tremendous support from my friends at Southwest Writers, First Fridays, & a screenwriting group that met at the Golden West saloon.

As I continued my touring, I could not get Luna out of my head, especially as I tried my hand at crafting a sequel that would uncover the dark secrets of her past. My social life suffered, & not just by being on the road every weekend. I think one date couldn't quite grasp that this Luna person I kept talking about was not an actual girlfriend. The date angrily told me not to call her until I was single again.

When Luna's first anniversary arrived, I still hadn't got money or even an accounting from my publisher, but I finally received a rave review from rebeccasreads.com from Advocate Narayan in India, who proclaimed me “the new voice of contemporary legal fiction” He highly recommended my book & mentioned that he thought the cover looked like something out of a Harlequin romance. Despite that one complaint, I finally felt vindicated. I could imagine Luna saying “You like me, you like me, you really like me!”

I checked my sales every day at my distributor's webpage & at Amazon. The books kept selling. Sometime, when I wasn't on the road, Luna hit critical mass — by the summer of 2005, I was down to my last hundred at the printers. I used every chance I could to sell — I did a signing during the release of the latest Harry Potter book & did great numbers. I also did one during an outdoor avant garde arts fair where I felt like I was signing on the surface of the sun in the 100° heat. I even sold books during my High School Reunion. It was especially gratifying to sell a copy to the bully who threw my locker padlock into the toilet in eleventh grade.

As the numbers on the inventory page dropped, I pushed even harder. I did a signing at Borders in Boulder during my law school alma mater, & at the University of Colorado homecoming before the CU-Texas A&M game. I did leave the signing to go to a barbecue at the law school. My numbers were below my personal quota, so after Ralphie the Buffalo, CU's Mascot, charged out for the second half, I charged back to Borders to buffalo my way back to respectability.

The next weekend, I finally received my reward — New York. Well, New York State. For the first time, a major law school agreed to fly me out & put me up at a four star hotel. It was a blustery October day as I wandered around Albany's Empire State Plaza. The gleaming white marble of the state's government buildings looked like it came from the hull of the Starship Enterprise, like a space station on one of the more fashionable neighborhoods of the Moon. I practiced my speech into the lunar wind.

As I arrived at the Law School, I was surprised that all the students were outside to greet me. Luna wasn't that big. Then I heard that someone had called in a bomb threat, & all events had been canceled. I had let Luna down.

A Dean of the Law School came up with a great idea to salvage the evening. The students may be gone, but I could still give my speech to faculty members. They retired to a seedy saloon where I sat at the head of the table &, in the glare from a jukebox that played classic rock, bellowed my standard speech. I wondered if the bikers in the other room would like Luna. One of the faculty members bought me three shots, & the others bought the rest of my books. There, in Albany in October I had finished my journey. I felt 107 pounds lighter.

I had called my latest book Amarillo in August because it was there, at my first out of state book signing that I finally felt like a real writer, & yes, a real man. In Albany in October, something just as wonderfully strange happened — as I got up to leave, my load the lighter for selling the last of my books, I saw an athletic-looking Latina on the other side of the bar room. I couldn't make her out clearly, she was too far away, but she waved at me shyly, & then ducked outside.

I hurriedly followed her & saw her striding away to vanish in the shadows of the moonlight. In that instant, I finally felt free & couldn't help but think one last thing — she really did have a butt worth getting disbarred for.

Jonathan Miller
2006©Jonathan Miller