EMBRACING FAILURE WITH HUMILITY

Looking Back a Literary Misstep With A Smile

Way before I became a music journalist, I wanted to be a novelist. My mother was going to night school when I was an adolescent, so our apartment was full of books. I remember reading James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ and Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ around age thirteen. As a teen I’d pick up Ernest Hemingway’s ‘In Our Time,’ Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son,’ and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby,’ and envision myself as that kind of storyteller. Recently I found an series of sketches I wrote about growing up in Brooklyn circa ‘70s that are a hodge podge of influences from all the writer’s I mentioned above.

By my late-20s I was a professional journalist and had published a couple of quality non-fiction books. But the desire to become a novelist still burned bright. I wrote a small love story about a young journalist and the rise of hip hop titled, Urban Romance, that was published in 1993. It did well, making a couple of black bestseller lists and going through several printings. After that promising start, I thought this was going to be my way forward.

In 1996, I attempted to write a big commercial book about the life of an R&B songwriter just as rap music was on the rise. It was full of characters I knew well, from the crusty older promotion men to the closeted R&B singers to the up coming rap moguls. It had a lot of sex, including a character who’d be MeToo’d now, and lots of detail of the backroom deals and exploitation that marred the creation of beautiful music. There was a love story in there, but it was secondary to the personalities of the fictionalized characters and a plot that covered three decades.

My first mistake was the title - Seduced: Life and Times of a One Hit Wonder. The ‘Seduced’ part was a call back to Urban Romance, but it was really wrong since the love story was, honestly, rather tacked on to the main narrative. ‘Life and Times of a One Hit Wonder’ was a more accurate title, but hardly compelling. Then the first cover was a weird mash up of a black vinyl disc and an Aaron Douglas painting. Terrible. By the time the novel was a paperback, the publisher had discarded with the sub-title, and sold it has love story/romance novel. (See the cover below.)

My novel three I had a new editor, but the reaction to ‘Seduced’ (despite a few good reviews) had shaken my confidence. I turned in my manuscript and it was soundly rejected. I was told “this is just words on paper” and not a book. She even asked for my advance back. I got advice from an attorney and was able to beat that back, but I put fiction on the back burner for a years.

Eventually I would move into noir fiction and publish a series of novels that involved an amateur detective named D Hunter and the music business. But the sting of the failure of ‘Seduced’ has always lingered with me., like a door I tried to open but never found the key. Just before Christmas I pulled the novel off the shelf, thinking there may be some food for thought in these nearly three decades old pages. I was pleased to discover a lot of cool observations. I just a few years removed from working as a full time journalist, so a lot of detail about clubs, studios, and people I knew leaped out at me. However, the language should have been more flavorful throughout. I didn’t push myself enough as a stylist. It feels at times more reported than experienced, which I think is the line of demarcation between good journalism and serious fiction.

Thankfully, there are some nice musical moments. The protagonist, Derek Harper, takes a gig as a road manager on one of the first arena sized rap tours. The description of life on the road from the two pages below, really does capture the zombie feeling of those multi-city tours with immature young acts that I lived through covering a number of artists in the ‘80s. So while ‘Seduced’ was a failure in its time, there was some value in it 333 pages. Don’t be surprised of small bits of the book end up in this Substack in 2024. After all, this is a mixtape.