Sometimes writing can take you to interesting places. We were a couple of books into the SURVIVALIST series and hoping to get a contract for some more, seeing as how we felt we had plenty of story to work with. Then, the contracts we were hoping for did arrive, along with a note saying that they were urgently needed back in the publisher’s hands. Could we sign them and overnight the paperwork that same day? At this time, there was no Express Mail service in our town and we had to travel to a town about thirty minutes away that did offer the service. It was getting late in the day, Jerry got behind the wheel and drove off and I started reading the contracts. The first one I looked at was missing a page or two. Damn! I thought, hopefully, since each contract was in triplicate, the missing pages were stapled in with the other copies. No such luck. I went through three copies of three separate contracts with no luck. Pages were missing from them all.
Our mommas didn’t raise complete fools! We turned around, went home and got on the telephone to our editor who in turn put us on with one of the publishers. Turns out that they "misplaced" some of the pages when they were making some changes and suggested we fly up to New York and sign the contracts in their office and take in a day or two of sightseeing, all at their expense, of course. We couldn’t pass up the offer and made all the arrangements necessary.
It turned out that a very well known movie producer was interested in making a SURVIVALIST movie – hence the contracts for additional books in the series. If we had blindly signed the contracts as they had been sent to us we would have had a tough time getting any action out of the ensuing deal. Instead, we got to meet with the producer and his staff along with our publisher and participate in the deal.
Things turned out well for us. Not only did we make a little money – emphasis on little – we met some interesting and really nice movie people, got to sit in on a private screening of Jimmy Cagney’s last movie, visit the Guggenheim Museum, go to a Broadway matinee staring Lauren Bacall and shop at Macys Department Store! The only disappointment was that Jerry wanted to visit the bar Mickey Spillane used to frequent and found out that it had closed just a few years before our visit. We also got to meet our editor and created a much better working relationship and we got a handle on how many stories are optioned for movies and how few are actually made.
We came home to life’s usual realities and settled back into our writing schedule, but, stopping to ask each other, “Do you remember when we saw what’s his name? He looks so normal in real life. I thought that cab driver was going to kill us all! When he told us to think thin when he was driving in between traffic lanes on the way to the airport, I though he was kidding!”
Ahh. New York, New York!
Next time I’ll tell you how this visit was the birthplace of the SURGICAL STRIKE three book series.
Sharon