Here’s another guest blog, a mini-interview with Stephen D. Rogers, an EXTRAORDINARILY prolific short story writer and poet.  And by extraordinary, I mean over 500 published stories and poems. He’s just published a collection of his mysteries, too:  Shot to Death from Mainly Murder Press.

On Friday, I got my author copies of Cugini Maledetti from Delos Books. It’s my first translated novel, and as you can see from this photo, I am pretty darned happy about it.

Now Cugini Maledetti (Delos Books Odissea) is the Italian translation of Curse of the Kissing Cousins (Berkley Prime Crime), which was the paperback release of Without Mercy (Five Star). Yes, that’s three titles for three editions. No, four, because Wheeler did a large print edition.

I mention this because I want to make a point about perseverance. Actually, two points.

The first point is this: if you don’t keep trying, no matter how good a book you’ve written, it will never get published if you give up on it. Second, if you do keep trying, you never know what good things will happen. This book, no matter what title you care to use, illustrates both these points.

For the first point, I have to start with a confession. I very nearly gave up on this book. After my editor at Kensington and I came a mutual decision that it was time for me to start a new series, I was ready and raring to go on the “Where are they now?” series. I wrote a proposal, which included the first three chapters, and my agent and I started sending it out. And started collecting rejection slips. Was it the writing? The premise? My track record? All of the above, or none of the above? Who knows? My agent and I did our best, but nobody at the New York houses wanted it.

Then I heard about Five Star. I did some research, and found out that even if they published the book, the distribution would mostly limited to libraries, but I really wanted to write this book. So I submitted to them, and they accepted. Somebody liked it after all! They published Without Mercy.

Still, I hated that Without Mercy wouldn’t be in the bookstores, so I started looking at paperback reprint houses. I found out that Berkley Prime Crime does a few paperback reprints, and I had a relationship with an editor via the anthologies I co-edit with Charlaine. So I approached her. She liked the book, too, but since the house had already published a book with the title Without Mercy, they asked for a title change. They published Curse of the Kissing Cousins.

Now I had submitted to Berkley Prime Crime before, albeit to a different editor, but they hadn’t wanted the book. By getting it out from Five Star, and then approaching a different editor, I convinced them to take a chance. Even better, they gave me a three-book contract, and Who Killed the Pinup Queen?, the second book of the series, comes out in early January of 2010.

Then there’s the second point, about the unexpected benefits of perseverance. The Mystery Writers of America, of which I’m a member, publish anthologies and announced that they were accepting submissions for an anthology of legal mysteries. I wrote a story, then realized it was too long, and I couldn’t trim it enough to fit. So I wrote another story, titled it “Kangaroo Court,” and submitted it. It was rejected. Next I submitted it to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and they bought it. Okay, that’s just another example of not giving up. The unexpected part came next.

That’s when I got an email from an editor at Delos Books in Italy. He’d read “Kangaroo Court,” and saw in my about-the-author note that I’d just published Without Mercy. He wanted to know if I’d be willing to submit it to him to be translated for his Odiessea Mystery line. I was willing, and he liked it. They published Cugini Maledetti.

Had I not tried a second story after the first one was too long, had I not submitted to another market after the first one turned me down, I’d never have published “Kangaroo Court,” and probably would not have my first translation in my hot little hand.

That’s why one of the best pieces of advice I can offer any aspiring writer isn’t about writing at all. Instead it’s from the movie Galaxy Quest:

Never give up. Never surrender.

I recently saw a post on a writers’ board that annoyed the heck out of  me. An aspiring novelist wrote:

Good writers aren’t trained. Good writers are born.

Oh yeah? So why wasn’t the retelling of Thumbelina I wrote in second grade a massive success? Why weren’t all the other short stories and novels I wrote over the years a testanebt to my talent? Why is it I didn’t actually sell a piece of fiction until more than thirty years after I was born?

Try these on for size:

• Good accountants aren’t trained.  Good accountants are born.
• Good psychologists aren’t trained.  Good psychologists are born.
• Good auto mechanics aren’t trained. Good auto mechanics are born.

And so on. All of those careers require a whole lot of training–why would anybody think writing is any different? Nobody expects a surgeon to be able to remove an appendix successfully the first time she picks up a scalpel, so why should they expect to be able to write a novel as soon as they get a word processor up and running?

Folks, I trained. I have a degree in English. I interned writing press releases, read slush pile stories for a college literary magazine, and was features editor for my college newspaper. I took writing courses outside of school as well, and attended countless lectures, talks, and panels on writing. I’ve read a shelf full of writing books. I spent a decade writing software documentation, plus occasional articles and limericks. And I did the two things that I think are most important for any writer:  I read and I wrote. For years, I read anything I could get my hands on, and for years, I wrote.

If that isn’t training, then I don’t know what is.

Maybe some people don’t see it as training because it wasn’t a formal process like passing a CPA exam, completing an internship in clinical psychology, or taking a course in engine repair. Though there are formal writing degrees, the majority of writers don’t have them–for the most part, we train ourselves. That doesn’t mean it’s not training.

I’m not saying that I wasn’t born with a certain amount of writing talent, because I certainly like to think that I was. But if I hadn’t taken the time effort to get what training I could, all I’d have to blog about is Thumbelina.

NOTE: I admit to being cranky today. I also posted on the Femmes Fatales blog about another statement about writing that annoyed me. Must be the weather.