Huzzah! "The Night Ol' Jack Came Back" sells to Jack O'Spec

Oct 20, 2010 22:44




Karen Romanko just notified me she is buying my reprint "The Night Ol Jack Came Back" for her JACK O'SPEC anthology!

I'm just starting to get a handle on the reprint market, but when I heard about the antho, I knew it was a good fit. So how did I come to write it? Time to steal a WAYBACK machine and travel to that dreamy time of yesteryear known as 2004.

I'd been writing for a few years. I was throat deep in grad school. And I'd just found out that, courtesy of overspending in my department (by a very large amount), all courses were cancelled. Including mine. Ten grand vanished and I was unemployed.

Eep.

I went back to retail to pay some bills, and hunted for jobs everywhere, eventually working (believe it or not) seven jobs while taking a heavy course load. One of the jobs I made for myself was with the Kingston Whig Standard. I'd written freelance articles for chump change for years. Even had a short lived column (as in one column, but that's another story). So I told my editor I wanted to do a serialized story of five installments that ended on Halloween. It would be PG, but spooky and fun. He agreed. And the main editor agreed to pay me 500.00 bucks!

I've not been so well paid for my fiction since.

The result was "The Night Ol' Jack Came Back", a fun YA adventure story set in Halloween, using the history of the Jack O' Lantern, and some of Kingston's more horrific local sites (like the infamous Skeleton Park). That story paid the better part of my rent when I had no more dough and I am absolutely stoked to see it come out in a book. Thanks to Karen for buying the story and giving it a new live.

Huzzah!

JSR
Previous post Next post
Up
[]