Thursday, September 22, 2011

How I Came to Write This Book: Frank Bill's Crimes in Southern Indiana



Sometime in 2007 I’d written a story called the Old Mechanic based on stories my mother told me and the first time I met my real grandfather. It got a two page rejection letter. The editors at Talking River Review had been going back and forth. They really liked the story but had a few things they didn’t like. I got pissed and wrote The Penance of Scoot McCutchen.

Sent it back to the same journal. It got accepted. I re-wrote and edited a story called A Coon Hunter’s Noir. Sent it to Hardboiled magazine. It got accepted in 2008. From here, I wrote Trespassing Between Heaven and Hell, Old Testament Wisdom and took a few pieces from a novel I wrote in 2007 that never got published. A Rabbit in the Lettuce Patch and Officer Down. More followed and in toward the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 I wrote Rough Company, Beautiful Even in Death, Hill Clan, Tweakers (another version of Officer Down), The Need, All the Awful, These Old Bones and Flesh Rule.

I was getting a lot of attention. Neil Smith of Plots With Guns told me I needed a novel. I said I have enough stories for a book. He said, short stories don’t sell. But maybe you could connect them. I thought they were connected enough by region. I hadn’t named the book yet and thought, they all take place in southern Indiana. Called the book Crimes in Southern Indiana. I sent the manuscript to DZANC BOOKS. They had a contest for short story manuscripts and if accepted they’d pay you $1000 bucks. They turned CISI down rather quickly.

My good friend Kyle Minor mentioned an agent. I queried her. She said send the manuscript of stories. The agent got back to me in 24 hours. Dug the stories but wanted a novel as well. My novel wasn’t finished. I sent Crimes in Southern Indiana to an agent Neil Smith and Scott Phillips mentioned, it took a while but the agent got back to me. Dug the stories and after reading the first 25,000 words of my manuscript, she signed me.

Not quite a year later I had a two book deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux and I was writing a story called Cold, Hard, Love that made it into Needle: A Magazine of Noir. I also wrote a piece called Luz Verde for the Crime Factory anthology: Nightshift. During the first round of edits with my publisher, I fused Luz Verde and Flesh Rule together, I wanted something that made this connection to the region I was born and raised in like Poachers by Tom Franklin did when I first read it. Only I wanted it to mirror the changing climate, combining the old world that my grandfather knew as a hunter with the newer climate I see exploding in the small towns. Those two stories became one, Crimes in Southern Indiana.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice coincidence. I was browsing the new books in the library yesterday (after picking up another five I had on reserve) and was immediately struck by this title. It looked right up my alley.

Good luck with it.

Jeff M.

Charles Gramlich said...

I finally gave up on the agent route. No one was interested.

Steve Oerkfitz said...

Great book. Just finished it this afternoon. Don't think I'll be vacationing in S. Indiana anytime soon. The locales reminded me a lot of small Northern Michigan towns. The ones that yuppies haven't yet turned into vacation spots.

Sandra Scoppettone said...

Never SIGN with an agent. There's no point. If either of you decide you don't like each other you split. If you don't like the agent you may be out of luck. And if she/he doesn't like you anymore, why would you want to be with that agent.