PeterHogenkampWrites

I know what you're thinking. Why put up with all that rejection? Wouldn't I have been better off sometime after the first fifty rejections to just take up Canasta? After a hundred rejections try to fine tune my German pronunciation? Close to the two-hundred-and-fifty mark, shouldn't I have have attemtped to learn the didgeridoo, the King of Aboriginal instruments? (FYI, I haven't had 250 rejections, although I am getting close and it feels like a thousand.) The answer, of course, is Nein ; I wouldn't have been better off. And there is a simple reason why. My gut instinct is to tell you that if I had, then (insert shameless plug here) my first published novel,  The Intern , would never have been made it to print, (Insert another shameless plug here) nor would  The Vatican Conspiracy  have either. And while that is very good incentive for a guy that has been writing for a long time, it's not what I am getting at. I started my first manuscript fifteen years a...

My seventeen-year-old son and I were sitting in the admissions office of Holy Cross College last week when it hit me: it was thirty-two years to the day when my father had escorted me there for my own interview. It was the summer of 1981 and we were on our way to Cape Cod for a week's vacation and a visit with my sister who had been working in Hyannis for the season. My father had asked me several months previously if I had wanted to visit Holy Cross College on the way, but I had dismissed the idea without consideration. I was seventeen-years-old, and the prospect of following in my father's footsteps at Holy Cross hadn't appealed to me. Since he hadn't brought the subject up again, I had thought the matter had been dropped until I woke up from a nap and found us parked on the side of a steep street lined with tall trees. "Where are we?" I yawned. "Holy Cross College," my father replied. "I thought you might want to stretch your legs for a bit....

We live in a success oriented culture. If you don't think this is true, consider the case of Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod) of the New York Yankees. When A-Rod was leading the Yankees to one pennant after the next, no one seemed to care that A-Rod was using steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. But when A-Rod started to struggle (after he was forced to play without PED) he became the pariah he is today. Lesson to the young people in the world: As long as you are successful, the methods you used to become successful don't matter. And the converse: if you are not successful, you will be rigorously cross-examined and then cast aside. By way of a second example, here is just one paragraph of what I found on the net when I googled the issue: (from Total Pro Sports)    The Caltech Beavers men’s basketball team (NCAA Div. III) hold the longest losing streak in NCAA history. Spanning 207 games and 11 years, the team went from 1996 to 2007 without a win. Their in-conference losi...

If you are, like me, on the lookout for a fresh voice in the thriller genre, clear out your schedule for a few days and pick up a copy of Jim Satterfield’s Saving Laura . Set in Wyoming and Colorado—a region Satterfield knows like his backyard— Saving Laura is the tale of a young man willing to risk everything to save the girl he loves from an unscrupulous drug dealer. It is a common theme, yes, but Satterfield does it with uncommon style: in the smooth and easy prose that flows like the waters of the Roaring Fork River, in the characters as real as the Rockies themselves, and in the use of the setting—described beautifully—as a character unto itself. So well does Satterfield know the terrain and understand its denizens, that the reader is much like a movie-goer, watching the story unfold amid the snow-tinged peaks and aspen-covered hills. But there is more to Saving Laura than beautiful scenery, much more. In classic thriller fashion, there is never really an...

 It is my great pleasure today to bring you an interview with my literary agent, Liz Kracht of Kimberley Cameron & Associates. I want to keep my introductory remarks brief--because you all have heard much from me before and you are reading this because you want to hear from Liz--but suffice it to say that Liz is an author's literary agent (kind of like a player's manager in baseball): approachable, witty, realistic yet hopeful (tough combo in this gig), loyal (let me stress how important this is), and reliable. Enjoy the interview.  Peter Hogenkamp (PH): What is the biggest misperception today about writers and/or publishing? Elizabeth Kracht (EK):   I think one of the biggest misperceptions I’ve seen—concerning both writers and publishing, plus media coverage—is around highly publicized “overnight” success stories. I don’t believe there are overnight success stories. I think we like to believe there are, because it gives hope and feeds our fantasy life, ...