It was November of 2010, and I sat, as I often did at an enormous wooden table in the middle of the great room (great for so many reasons) at 62 Pearl Street in New York's Financial District. Next to me sat the great Isaac McPhee (even greater than the room). As he had done so many times before during our Writers Club meetings (which over the years had dwindled to a writers twosome), he sat with his finger poised over his computer's mouse, the cursor resting on "generate random word." Our normal routine was to find a random word, then write for approximately half an hour on the theme of that word. We had had some doozies: crook (a story about a man who stole a fireplace brick by brick), slam (a crazy man living in a cave obsessed with the word "slam"), and my favorite, coextension (on the theme of which Isaac crafted a brilliant satire of modern self-indulgent free-verse poetry, complete with alliteration and the occasional veiled allusion to death).
I had never actually participated in our writers club game, having been too preoccupied with writing my first book: a travel memoir about my adventures among the orphans of Uganda. And had I ever participated before that fateful November day, I would certainly not have written fiction. In fact, I had never written a word of fiction in my life. My ascent into fiction was entirely Isaac's fault.
"Today you're going to write fiction, Amanda," he chided me.
"I don't write fiction," I protested.
"I don't care. Today you will," he replied confidently, knowing full well he would get his way.
"But..." I whined.
"Do it."
"Fine."
I sat at my computer, my fingers resting lightly on the home keys.
"The word is..." He clicked. "Rookery."
In less than a second, I had comprehended the word, and decided that a rookery must be a place where rooks lived. My fingers began to move. It was unpremeditated, the story that came flowing straight from the ether to the page. It had all my favorite things: tea, England, purple heather fields, the Victorians, adventure, and talking animals. It was as if I had written the daydreams I had forgotten I'd dreamed, and before I had even begun, my thirty minutes were up.
Isaac read his story first, about a delusional homeless man who lived in a shed and wore shoes that had no soles. It was enchanting, as is most of what he writes. When he finished, I read my story--the first chapter of The Rookery.
"That's a book!" he said, his amazement unrestrained. "You have to finish it! Twenty more chapters like that and you would have a book. Do it."
"But I don't write fiction," I reminded him.
"Clearly you do," he snarled good-naturedly, as only Isaac McPhee can.
"Perhaps I will..."I replied evasively. I am, after all, an academic. I write non-fiction.
But he wouldn't drop it. He wouldn't let me forget about it. The Uganda book was going nowhere, and I was feeling discouraged. Finally, early in January 2011, I relented and decided to do it. I asked Isaac to help me with plot development because he is a plot genius, and then I asked him to write the dialogue for the antagonists, and before we knew it, we had a full-fledged writing partnership. We chose more random words and wrote more chapters, tossing the story back and forth over GoogleDocs like a game of literary ping-pong. By the time we reached chapter eight, we knew where we were going, and four weeks after we'd begun in earnest, we had a book.
The story has been through about thirteen major edits since we finished the first draft, and with each edit I became a better writer, a better critic of my work, a better collaborator. Since finishing it a year ago, The Rookery has been read by several literary agents, most of whom gave me incredibly helpful suggestions for its improvement. I feel as if I've taken a master class in fiction writing, and am extremely grateful to the professionals who took time to read and comment. Sadly, none of those agents felt that they were the right person to represent The Rookery. The answer has always been, "It's a wonderful book, charming, and well-written, but I think someone else will be a better representative for it--someone will love it more than I do and be able to champion it all the way to publication."
Perhaps that's true. But I already know scores of people who love The Rookery--people who have listened to it chapter by chapter in my living room, people who have read it on the subway, children who have snuggled into their beds while their parents read it over them. These are the champions of The Rookery. Regular people who know a good story when they read it. People like you. People whose living doesn't depend on how many copies of the book sell in which markets and in which quarter. I would love to see The Rookery on a bookstore shelf someday, but right now the business side of bookmaking is keeping you and me apart. And I don't like it. I would rather just give it away so you can enjoy it. So read it here for free. Tell your friends. Read it to your children, to your second-grade class, to your parents. Most of all, get lost in the wonder of The Rookery. It's a magical place, and I just couldn't keep it to myself for one more day.
