Yikes, I challenge the great Don Maass

I hold Don Maass in high regard. He's a great agent and the best of the teaching agents out there. I attended his Breakout Novel Intensive workshop and walked away with a treasure trove of knowledge and inspiration. If you want to learn from the best, attend one of Don's workshops.

That doesn't mean I don't take a different view than Don on a point or two.

I keep Don's The Breakout Novelist at hand whenever I sit down to hammer on my keyboard. The book is full of step-by-step advice, the kind that authors with more street credentials than I take to heart. But here's where I have a problem. In that writing guide, Don has these words; "Now think about the people whom you deeply admire, who stir in you awe, respect, humility, and high esteem. Are these regular people, no different than anyone else? They may be everyday folks like friends or family, true enough, but you see in them what is exceptional, strong, beautiful, and brave."

Those are all great characteristics, the stuff of ten thousand heroes and protagonists of fine literature. I don't disagree with Don's point, but it overlooks the power of the mundane. It masks the greatness of the middle class. Must each hero be exceptional, strong, beautiful, and brave? No. Those folks who live in a mundane world can be heroic while being unexceptional, flawed, rather ordinary, and weak. I see it all the time. I take those less-than-ideal attributes and inject them into main characters, and they turn out strangely heroic, but not in the sense of usual heroism.

I will introduce the main character of my soon-to-be-released novel The Search for Circe as an illustration. He is Sean McNabb, and he's as much an Ordinary Joe as you and I. His life is pockmarked with failure. He's divorced, works a job that pays the bills but does little else, and carries mental tapes of a rough childhood. He's a guy you might see in the grocery store and overlook.

How do I elevate a main character such as that to a position of literary prominence? I take unexceptional, flawed, ordinary, and weak Sean and put him into bizarre circumstances and settings. Ah, maybe there's something in that. I sent Maass a query letter about this novel. I didn't hear back from him for a long time, which is not rare when querying literary agents. He finally replied that he gave my manuscript serious consideration, but opted not to take it on because of his heavy workload. (I respect that after hearing Don talk about his daily routine during a speech at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference a few years ago.) But Don took a serious look when armed only with my query letter, the first two chapters of my manuscript, and a two-page synopsis. That's positive.

I will announce the release of my novel on Facebook and Twitter. I'll publish on Smashwords.com again, as I did with my earlier One Summer Season: A Young Man's Brutal Baptism Into Love And Baseball. It's a good vehicle for self-publishing. In the meantime, I'll research Smashwords' guide on how to format, etc., and will do social media work to spawn interest. I will read through the novel one last time to look for errors in editing and story construction.

The one thing I won't do is wait for a Kirkus Reviews analysis of my novel. That review is due in late November. I don't want to wait that long.