By: Mark Butterworth
Big Hollywood

It took forty years, but I’m finally on a roll. In writing fiction, that is.

Back in 1970, I was an eighteen year old, budding virtuoso on acoustic fingerstyle guitar, the kind of stuff Leo Kottke and John Fahey were doing. I was poor, and figured that in order to develop my music as I desired, I’d need a separate income. I was going to junior college, and fell in love with creative writing. Foolishly (hey, I was young!), I became convinced I could make a good living as a writer, and decided to pursue that parallel to my practice of music.

You can hear some of my music here and watch a few videos here:

Fast forward to 9/11/2001. I’d already caught on to reading early bloggers like Instapundit when the monsters struck the Twin Towers. I was shaken and infuriated to the core, and then discovered I had coronary disease after a heart attack three days later. I recovered with two implanted stents. I was not yet fifty, had yet to make a dime on either my music or prose, and now I was feeling mortal, yet patriotic like never before. So I got on the bandwagon and began blogging as Sunny Days in Heaven, a conservative Catholic blog that attracted 50 or 60 readers on a good day. Never had an Instalanche.

I blogged a few years with diminishing returns, and was going to quit when a start-up, Spero News, asked me to contribute. Just then, a Hollywood promo agency decided that bloggers could help sell a movie, and began inviting them to screenings. Free movies? Sign me up.

The first movie I reviewed was the delightful and fun, Serenity. I predicted it would be a smash hit. That was not to be, alas.

After few years reviewing a hundred or more films annually, 90% that I either disliked or hated, writing negative reviews wore me down, but the thought occurred: I could do better than what I was seeing. The chance of selling a spec script seemed much better than a literary novel. Very few first novels are published any year, and the authors get tiny advances (if at all). But Hollywood buys around 3000 scripts a year for good sums of money even if the stories are never converted to film.

I quickly wrote three (ahem, brilliant) screenplays, and got a brief nibble on one from a budding producer. The fact is, you have to be in LA to sell your stuff, and I couldn’t do that. Too old, too tired, and too unconnected. Late in life I learned you need to make a lot of friends and acquaintances in any business if you hope to succeed. You have to be in the game where the game is played.

The hell with it, then. I couldn’t not write, the juices were flowing, so I started writing funny and serious little novels for a conservative, tradition minded audience in the hope that the Right side of the media might take these things to heart and promote entertainment that encouraged and edified our side of the spectrum.

But there is no Regnery for conservative novelists. Neither National Review nor The New Criterion beats the bushes looking for the next Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. A few Christian agents nibbled on one of my stories. P. J. O’Rourke (peace be upon him) was kind enough to get his editor to read one manuscript (who passed it to his twenty-something asst. who pronounced it “entertaining and well written but I’ll pass”).

I kept writing fiction and pulling my few hairs out. I have to, I must write something commercial that everyone wants to read! That no one can pass on because it’s just too good to ignore.

And it came to me. Dog books do really well. Rescuing Sprite, Marley and Me were mega-hits.

I love dogs. I own dogs. I have two German shepherds. I had another one who died before these two. Okay. A story about my dogs. But what can they do? They just lie around the house. They don’t have adventures apart from the occasional squirrel chase and cat hunt.

Money. The story should involve money. Everyone cares about money. Since the last market crash, I finally bought some gold. What if the story was about dogs and real gold? Bingo! A Man with Three Great German Shepherds . . . and 1000 troy ounces of gold.

Logline: A retired Navy man with three beautifully trained German shepherds flees from Sacramento to Idaho with the IRS after his gold.

And I was off to the races. Agents loved the concept, my blurb and synopsis. But these three passed because their clients had dog books. These ten passed because it’s not an area they usually represent, but this one agent took the bait. He bit. “At last,” he said, “a Christian novelist who’s actually a fine writer first, and not like the Zondervan junk you always see.” We talked about signing a contract.

A week later, he informs me that his colleagues have convinced him that the fine Christian writer he’s been looking for all this time won’t do well in the Christian market. No deal. But but but, I sputtered, “You don’t know what a market will bear until you test it.”

Sorry, Charlie.

The hell with you all. People are selling tens of thousands of ebooks by pricing them for 99 cents. I’ll hit every libertarian, Christian, conservative online e-zine or blog, and every dog loving group in existence and maybe, just maybe, even National Review might sit up, take a gander and notice there are other writers on our side beside Andrew Klaven, Vince Flynn, and Brad Thor.

When folks have decided they love A Man with Three Great German Shepherds, well, I’ve got a catalogue and more good stuff to come.

And if you love dogs, how can you resist this.

Ed. Note: Tomorrow and Wednesday we will run excerpts from “A Man with Three Great German Shepherds”. — JN