The Story Behind the Story
I had never thought about writing a children’s story – until I had a child of my own. My daughter, Juliáe, was conceived in the fall of 1998, between the reality-biting book fairs in Seattle and San Francisco, which had left me wondering if I should change the name of my self-publishing sole proprietorship from Soaring Sparrow Press to something like Reeling Robin Press or Writhing Wren Press, or maybe Hobbling Heron Press or Crippled Canary Press or Wounded Warbler Press, or perhaps Battered Bunting Press or Suffering Swallow Press or Maimed Magpie Press or Traumatized Turkey Press.
I was working as a bartender in the members-only United Red Carpet Club at Portland International Airport when Juliáe was born. Well, at the actual time she was born, which was at 2:12 a.m. on August 12th of 1999, I was in the delivery room at Legacy Emmanuel Hospital with Sawako and Sawako’s mother, who had come from Japan to help out.
I didn’t make much money as a bartender in the Red Carpet Club. I made a whole lot more (and worked a whole lot less) as a conversational English teacher in Japan, where I lived from 1983 to 1997.
Me, Juliáe and Sawako, when Juliáe was one year old.
In Japan, I was a man of distinction; I was a somebody. Here in America, I was a nobody, and now I was a nobody with a daughter. I hadn’t scored with my self-published books like I thought I would, and that’s an understatement. I had been incredibly naïve about self-publishing and the corporate-controlled book-selling world.
I didn’t know what, if anything, I would be able to give financially to Juliáe, but I knew that I could give her a children’s story, so that’s what I aimed to do. I decided that the story would consist only of animals and that the main character would be a duck. Thus, Marvin Mallard was hatched. As for the moral of the story, I wanted it to be something substantial, something that would help Juliáe, and hopefully help others too.
While living and traveling abroad, I was able to look at the United States of America more objectively. One thing that struck me about Americans as being counter-productive for both individual growth and general harmony was the pervasiveness of the ‘It’s not my fault; it’s your fault’ mentality. So I decided that the main moral of the story would be that we should rise above blaming others and take responsibility for our own actions. First and foremost, however, I wanted to make the story funny. That has been the main thing for me with all of my books. Hey, I take humor seriously.
Red Carpet Club members didn’t look
like this guy.
In the Red Carpet Club, I was one part mixologist and three parts humorist. I became a legend behind the bar there, and I say this with all humility. (Unlike in America, humility is a virtue in Japan.)
I kept notes to help me remember names. Over the course of several years, I came to know approximately six hundred Red Carpet Club members by name. If they needed help remembering my name, I was quick to hand them a flier that contained not only my name, but also information about my books, which, if purchased directly from me, were two dollars off the list price.
Many Red Carpet Club members read The Champion of Reason or The Geographer. Among them was a fellow from Fort Collins, Colorado named Stuart Steinmark, who read them both and wanted to know what my next book was about. When I told him that the main character was a mallard, he said that his teenaged daughter, Sharyl, was a gifted artist who would be happy to draw my mallard just for the heck of it. I said okay and added that if the drawing was good enough, I would consider using it on the front cover and give Sharyl credit on the copyright page.
Sharyl Steinmark was fifteen years old when she drew my mallard (which did end up on the front cover). I was so impressed with the quality of the drawing that I asked her to do the interior artwork as well. She ended up doing eighteen full-color illustrations, which I reduced in size and set between text in the good, old-fashioned way.
Sharyl Steinmark
Despite being one thousand miles apart, Sharyl and I worked closely together. I sent her drafts, she sent me sketches, and we fired e-mail back and forth. Sharyl’s wonderful illustrations helped bring the story to life and added fuel to the fire that was burning inside me to write a really good story for Juliáe.
Sometimes people would comment that writing children’s books was where the money was at, and that Harry Potter was proof of that. They were usually the same people who said that I should get on Oprah Winfrey. "That’s a great idea," I sometimes replied with sarcasm. "I’ll give Oprah a call today and get on her show tomorrow."
I had actually thought that writing good books would be good enough to attain commercial success. It’s not. I found that out the hard way. The bookselling world is corporate-controlled from top to bottom and from the inside out. Self-published books can possibly be profitable, but only at the local level, and only if they’re non-fiction. Self-published fiction doesn’t have a chance.
I kept thinking that I was going to
make it.
My distributor cut me off for "insufficient sales". That was okay with me because book stores weren’t ordering my books anyway. I stopped going to book fairs because I could no longer justify giving every ounce of my energy just to break even, and I stopped hawking my books at Portland Saturday Market because I had returned home at the end of a hard day too many times without selling a single book.
My ego had taken blows high and low, with a sucker-punch to the midsection. I had gone from being a major somebody in Japan to being an absolute nobody in America. In Japan, I was highly respected and highly paid. Here in America, I was a bartender, and I wasn’t making much money because the bar in the Red Carpet Club was a slow bar. I may have been respected by people who read my books, but the fact is that my income was keeping us, as a family of three, barely above the official poverty level.
I foolishly thought that my books would score at least well enough so that I wouldn’t have to worry about money, which was the way it was for me back in Japan. Man, I had it made in the shade in the Land of the Rising Sun.
I thought about moving back to Japan, but that would have been giving up, and I didn’t want to give up, and Sawako was behind me, telling me that I should never give up. So I didn’t.
I worked hard on Marvin Mallard and the Magic Medallion. I worked hard on my other books too, but this book was different because I was writing it for one special person, and I wanted that person to be proud of me.