Tale of a One-Book Wonder

When I was 19, I wrote my first novel. It’s the story of a middle-aged white man who drops out of society and ends up befriending a street-smart black kid who’s all alone in the world. I worked on it for about a year, writing it by hand while riding to and from work on the bus. I spent evenings and weekends tapping on the keys of a manual typewriter, much to the dismay of my mama who got tired of hearing the incessant clickety-click click.

What she didn’t know was that I was on my way to creating a masterpiece. I had no way of knowing that either. All I knew was that this story was playing out in my head and I had to write it down. I checked out books on publishing at the library and found a list of publishers that I could send my manuscript to. I named my creation Marvin and Tige and mailed it off to the most likely candidate. Not long afterwards, I got a call at work from an editor at St. Martin’s Press who said she wanted to publish my book. Since I didn’t have an agent, the editor assigned one to me. Things like this don’t normally happen in the publishing world as many people in the profession pointed out to me later. I suppose I simply wrote the right type of story at just the right time.

Things moved pretty fast after that. The book came out in hardcover in 1978, and so began my 15 minutes of fame. I was flown to New York to do interviews from my fancy hotel room, treated to a Broadway showing of The Wiz and made an appearance on the game show What’s My Line. Back home in Atlanta, I became a speaker at schools and was the subject for magazines, local newspapers, TV and radio news shows.

Marvin & Tige was also published in paperback, and in several languages internationally. I’ve seen the French and Spanish versions but never saw the Japanese version even though I met the woman doing the translation for it. The movie rights were also sold. I’ll talk about the movie version in a separate post.

Everything was going pretty well in my life until my editor asked what I had planned as a follow up novel. It suddenly dawned on me that people were expecting me to repeat this fluke of success. I had nothing planned. There was no other story in my head demanding to be put to paper. I did give it a try though. I wrote a sequel to Marvin & Tige and something else that I’ve pushed completely out of my mind. Neither were very good and thus went the end of my highly anticipated writing career.

I never really considered myself a true writer. I was a graphic artist who just happened to write something special once. I attempted writing screenplays with no luck, then gave up writing altogether. It wasn’t until I discovered fan fiction that the desire to tell stories returned. More on that in a future post.

When it comes to my talents, I’m not much of a braggart. Most people who know me didn’t even know I could draw until recently. Some know that I’ve been working on a manuscript for a few years now, but I never brought up my previous success with writing. I guess I didn’t want them asking me why I stopped writing or where they could get a copy of my book. It’s been out of print for ages and is very hard to find. But this year, I decided to do something about that.

I am currently in the process of updating Marvin & Tige and getting it ready to be published again. I thought I could simply digitize it and republish as is. But things have changed a lot since it was originally written and I see the world differently now, so I’m going through it chapter by chapter to bring it into the computer and cellphone age.

I’ll be making updates of my progress. Please check out my next post for further details of the movie version of my book.