The First Page

My enthusiasm level was at an all-time high when the February 2020 San Francisco Writers Conference opened its registration tables in the cavernous atrium lobby of the Embarcadero Hyatt Regency.  With so many hundreds of others, I paged through the conference class schedule checking off what would most interest me—with the view of getting my two manuscripts, finally, to publication.

There was one class I had never heard of, and it was for the first session after the keynote speech the following morning.  Attendees were to bring four copies of the very first page of their manuscripts, double-spaced.  No book or chapter title allowed, just the body of that opening page, so it would really hit the readers cold—just them, and your opening words. 

There would be four professionals from the literary publishing world on the dais, three seated at a table, plus a man with a solid voice, who would read the submissions aloud.

What?  How would that?  And who would…? 

I had no idea how this would work, but trying something new, 3,000 miles from home, was one reason I had come the distance.

Of course, by the time I figured that I could attend the class, and what I needed to bring with me, it was past 10 PM.  Any nearby Kinko’s with printing service was closed.  Where to get my pages printed out?

I asked for assistance from a night-duty person behind the Hyatt front desk, but was told they could not plug my thumb drive into their computer system.

Finally, Jennafer, seeing a level of anguish on my face, wrote out her email address and told me to send what I needed to her.  Lickety-split, I was up in my room on the fourth floor doing just that.  But with her schedule and guests needing attention until all hours of the night, it was after midnight before I finally had two sets of four sheets of paper in my hand, so thankful for her having worked with me.

In the morning, after breakfast through the keynote address, I sped to the classroom and found several dozen others already there.  A couple of new friends and I found three empty seats near the left front.  Everyone who wanted to participate handed their pages across to the isle where many first-page sets were being collected for the panel members.  I saw the man, a thick sheaf of papers in his hands, shuffle the stack, so there would be no favoritism for the front or back of the room.

Those leading the class included the reader, Gordon Warnock, a literary agent and co-founder of Fuse Literary, Brenda Knight, an acquiring editor at Mango Press, Mary Rakow, a creative writing teacher, award-winning author, and world-class editor, and Paul S. Levine, entertainment attorney and literary agent.  Their combined experience of so many decades in the field certainly earned them, as a group, the right to judge the first pages of any wannabe authors in the audience.

The reader, Mr. Warnock, from behind the lectern, handed the panelists, seated at a table, down and to his left, the pages from the first submission.

In his clear baritone voice, he set out the rules.  He would read until one of the panel members raised a hand and made a statement.  This brought to mind the American Idol tryouts, when a judging celebrity—often Simon Cowell—would mash a button.  An enormous “X” above the stage would light up, with an accompanying jolting buzzer that would devastate the current performer.

There were no Xes above our panel, but the concept was scarily similar.  An X, and your day was over, dismissed, out, off the stage, what are you waiting for?

So, the cumulative anxiety in the large classroom was quite palpable.  Did you really want him to read your first page, first?  Better to have others go ahead of you.

The first, first page on top of the pile began the process.  By the end of the first paragraph, a hand went up from the dais.

“I’m bored,” was all the panelist said. 

Wow!  I hardly had a chance to get the gist of the just-begun story.

The second first page fared little better, perhaps two paragraphs in, when two hands went up, and it was over.

The third opened with a quote from Walt Whitman, and by its end, all the hands had gone up.  So, how not to start a book, is what we were hearing.  And pity each crushed would-be author in the room, their several heads now hanging low.

A woman had left Vietnam at two-months of age and wrote in the first person.  Up went the hands!  She was too young to know that story and had to change her point of view.  Out!

The next made it almost all the way through the page, but just before the end, a hand went up.  The author had summarized her entire story in that very first page.  A panelist complained there would be nothing new to learn from the rest of the book.  Be gone!

Now I was truly intimidated, because sooner or later, one of my submissions would climb its way to the top of the pile, the one about catching A Spy in the FBI, or The Signature Whisperer, about analyzing signatures.  But, of course, the reader didn’t know the titles.

Then I heard the words I wasn’t exactly ready for, but out they came.

“Every day may seem to start like the one that came before.  But once in a great while something happens, a life-changing moment that sets the wheels in motion of something dynamic.  For me, it was on a sleepy Sunday morning in San Diego in the spring of 1998 when I got an unexpected phone call.”

No hands raised yet, and no complaints.

It went on that an FBI agent from Washington, D.C., was calling another one in faraway San Diego, and wanted him to take on an intense undercover operation in a counterintelligence case.  But the caller didn’t want to give much more information over the phone. The matter was too sensitive.

By the end of the first page, the room was pretty quiet and there hadn’t been a peep from the dais.  After a short moment, because this was the first, first page that had made it all the way through, there were some murmurs of approval. 

Some of my nearby new friends knew this one had been mine—likely the only true-spy story at the conference.  I was hoping they couldn’t hear my heart pounding or see the veins pulsating in my temples.

My first page seemed to have passed muster, where receiving “no comment” was actually a good thing and some level of success.  It certainly eased my tension.  The speaker went on to the next submission.

I was pretty sure the shuffled pages would have dealt my other entry much farther down in the deck, so I felt somewhat relieved.

The man at the lectern handed the set of pages to the three judges.  He scanned his, briefly, and cleared his throat.  That was the moment when I felt a lump, more like a major league baseball, form in mine.

I had always been told that if you can’t get your first book published, write another!  Well, great for romance fiction, but my only true-spy story had taken years to research and write, although I did make an effort to follow the suggestion. 

In the last few years, since retiring from the FBI, I had done a lot of signature analysis, which included personality assessments.  This was based on a signature, alone, even without other background information about the signer.  I had found a niche in determining if a signature on a will or a deed was a forgery, to the delight of several clients, who, bad-actors were trying to cheat out of their inheritance.

So, in the previous few months I sequestered bits and pieces of time to try to write it all down and organize my thoughts on this very specific topic which had never quite been addressed before. 

The uncharted-territory aspect made me a quick “expert” in this newly discovered field, but how exactly would I describe all that I was doing?  Was it a how-to manual, with specific instructions on certain elements of a signature?  And who would let me use their signatures as examples, knowing their personality assessments might be published?  It was all very complicated, and within the last few days I had written and re-written the very first page, having no idea it would ever be assessed with this level of scrutiny.

In seconds, I would hear it again, as the man with the perfect, deep voice began.

“For as long as there has been the written word, there was a way for individuals to write their names, or at least a representation of it.”

I know I had gulped, but as quietly as possible.  No one near me knew this one was also mine.  And no panel hands had gone up yet.

He went on.

“You have all seen the uneducated man—in movies and on TV—usually poor, from American colonial times, and back much further, when a mere ‘X’ was written, and it meant his bond.  Witnesses would have been present who could actually write their names, verifying who had placed the X on the parchment.  It wasn’t very definitive, but it was certainly legal.  Yet if a person wrote his X large, or even very tiny, did that mean something?  It is likely that these fine points went unnoticed, back in the day, but there was something there to ‘read,’ even if only with an X written by the person’s hand.

“Then we come to perhaps the most famous signature of all, at least in terms of references to it, and that from nearly 250 years ago.  How many times have you heard someone say, ‘Put your John Hancock there!’  And, of course, it comes from the very assertive, if not flagrant and in-your-face statement, to King George III of England, by Mr. Hancock, essentially saying, ‘We, as colonists, and I, in particular, declare my independence from your tyranny!’

“And so it was for the man who signed first and biggest on the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and it was history made, by more than the stroke of his pen.  It was how he did what he did.  And if you haven’t seen that particular signature, especially in comparison to the wording of the original Declaration of Independence, as well as all of the other signatures, then you have missed the first lesson in reading signatures.  That is, almost everything and anything in a signature can matter.

“Unlike any other words you might ever write, your signature is very personal.  It is writing, not just your name, but think of it as writing yourself, right there on the page.

“At the moment of its writing, it is not just you, but it is how you see yourself, and right down to the tiniest features of however you articulate so neatly, or make your scrawl across the page.  That signature is you, plain and simple—and often, not so plain and simple.”

As the reader came to the end of the page, about a full two minutes of speaking, my thoughts were erratic.  I had known the words as he had spoken them, almost moved my lips to them as he went down the page.  But unlike the spy story’s first page, which was broken off before the reader could learn more, this first page almost came to a conclusion at the perfect time, at the end of the page.  It certainly wasn’t the whole story because there was a teaser in there for the reader to keep on going for the next 50,000 words.

When he stopped reading, at first, the room was silent.  It was as though they weren’t waiting for it to be shot down, but were actually listening to the words he had spoken, and were interested in hearing what came next, even with some level of anticipation.

It may just have been me, but the large room, with over a hundred people, seemed to be eerily at bay, like they were waiting for something, and the same for the reader, because he didn’t grab the next set of first pages to begin anew.  He just stood there.

One of the panelists, Brenda Knight, calmly asked a very silent room, “Whose book is this?”

All heads were looking around.

I slowly raised my hand.

From the other side of the lectern, Ms. Knight leaned forward and peeked around it to see the raised hand and the man attached to it.

“It’s mine,” I said, evenly.

After one more moment of silence, in a controlled, but assertive voice, she said, “I want this book.”

Now there was really silence, but, again, for only a moment.  Then the crowd began to cheer and applaud.  It was quite a commotion, and I half-stood up.

Brenda didn’t want to stop in the middle of the ongoing proceedings, but she didn’t seem to want to let this one get away, either.

She said, loud enough for me, and those nearby, to hear, “I’ll see you afterward.”

And she did.

We agreed to meet and speak on the phone, the latter, due to my across-the-continent distance from all things San Franciscan.

Through the following conference days, congratulatory comments were made to me by many who had been witnesses to those moments.  I learned something I would never have realized on my own.

With all the efforts a new author makes to persevere and sweat over, in writing a book, then the query letters and trying to meet just the right literary agent who deals in your genre, then working to get a one-on-one, face-to-face meeting with an agent, and even at conferences as this one, where there is an extra fee for the “speed dating” sessions with literary agents, there never before seems to have been a time when a book was actually scarfed up to be published, based solely on the reading of a single first page.  It was truly a moment of joy, and I am prouder than you could know. 

But that was my second book, my fallback project, written only to have something to do while I was working on getting my first one, the spy book, published!  So, now what?

I know, I get it, I hear you, don’t say it again! 

I will write a third book!

March 11, 2020

Plantation, FL