Two Success Stories: Writing victories resulting from attending the ASJA Writers Conference

Catching a Train
by Jim McCommons

This month, my first book, Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail, will be released. It has received good reviews including one from the Library Journal, which made it one of the "Editors' Fall Picks."

I owe much of this success to ASJA.

It wasn't until 2003 after I began to teach journalism full time at a university that I stumbled across the ASJA site on the web and perused the break-out sessions at that year's annual convention. I recognized Lisa Collier Cool's name because I assigned her book, How to Write an Irresistible Query Letter, in my feature writing classes. And I once worked with another presenter, Deb Gordon, when we were both health book writers at Rodale Press.

Because I'd been a freelancer for many years, I had the requisite clippings to join ASJA.

At my first convention the following year, I found it easy to relate to other members, hearing much that was familiar — dealing with difficult editors, writing queries, hustling up work, sweating out payments, and enjoying the freedom as well as dealing with the isolation of working at home. I had freelanced for seven years in the 1990s. At the pitch sessions, I met with several magazine editors and came home with two assignments, enough to cover the trip to New York as well as my ASJA membership fee.

When I began teaching, I promised myself that I would conjure up a book idea and use my free time in summer and over breaks to write. Well, I completed lots of magazine articles those first years of teaching, but the book idea never materialized.

Then in March 2007, during Spring Break, I took one of my sons on a train trip from Chicago to California to do an assignment for Audubon magazine. The trip encompassed the joys of rail travel along with all the troubles with Amtrak. We were 12 hours late into Sacramento. Because I'd been riding Amtrak since 1975 and my college days, I asked myself at the end of that trip, "Why hasn't the experience gotten any better?"

That question spurred the book idea. I would cross the country by rail, talking to folks riding and working the trains, and stop off to interview railroad historians, transportation experts, and passenger rail advocates. The book would be an amalgam of travel narrative and investigatory journalism.

I prepared a one-page query for the next ASJA conference and met with agents during the pitch sessions. The first agent gave me a blank look as I blabbered out my idea in that insanely, but understandably, short one-on-one meeting. Then I met with Adam Chromy of Artists and Artisans, who immediately nodded his head and threw out his own suggestions. When we shook hands, I felt a bit encouraged. Maybe there was something to develop after all.

The next day—during the public portion of the convention—I attended a session where Chromy sat on a panel of agents, talking about pitches and the importance of strong opening paragraphs in a book proposal. He saw me and came over afterward, "Hey, I've been thinking of your idea and I'd love to see a proposal."

Over the summer, I worked up the proposal, using the California trip as a sample chapter. I e-mailed the proposal to Chromy in early August and received comments back just two days later. I had a lot of work to do. We went back and forth that way for several weeks.

I also applied for a sabbatical from my university. By winter, I had a contract with Chelsea Green, a modest advance that would cover some travel and one semester of paid leave. I took another semester of unpaid leave and set off for 26,000 miles of rail journeys during the volatile year of 2008, which was marked by high gas prices, record Amtrak ridership, a national economic meltdown, the election of the first rail-friendly administration, and an economic stimulus package that includes billions for high speed rail projects. Passenger rail, transportation issues became big news.

When I'm teaching, I tell my journalism students they need to develop targeted story pitches, prepared professionally, and delivered to the right editors.

I can do the first two well most of the time, but not always the third.

ASJA put me in touch with the right people for this project.

James McCommons, an ASJA member, is a former senior editor at Organic Gardening magazine and specializes in ecology and travel writing. He teaches journalism and nature writing at Northern Michigan University in the Upper Peninsula.

Chasing Down the Big One
by Jessica Dulong

I was craving the big story. After five years of freelancing, I wanted to immerse myself in a project and produce work that was weightier and more involved than what I had been cranking out for magazines. But I had no idea what that might actually entail.

The assignments I scrounged up (even those for Newsweek International, Rolling Stone, CosmoGIRL!, and Psychology Today) didn't allow me the chance to dig as deeply into the material as I wished. I wanted to plunge into a single subject, while instead I was covering everything from white-power hate groups to lesbian newlyweds to teens who kill their parents, writing shorter and shorter pieces as magazines shifted toward publishing "packages" instead of stories. I liked the work, but all the jumping around made my head spin.

Meanwhile, I had been hearing amazing stories about people on the Hudson River—the pioneers, oddballs, and obsessives making their lives and livings on the river throughout history to today. My dual life had provided this open door.

In addition to being a freelance journalist, I've spent nearly a decade working on an antique New York City fireboat, John J. Harvey, as one of the world's few female fireboat engineers. All my hours running the engines and working to preserve a 1931 boat, which for six decades served the city fighting pier and ship fires and now operates as a living museum, had granted me uncommon access to a world of stories. Stories that needed to be told.

Boat work offered a reprieve from rustling up the next writing gig. (How many nights did I decide to skip networking cocktails so I could sit on the boat listening to the salts swap stories?) But soon I came to realize that my "escape" from the grind of pitching also had offered me material I could sink my teeth into. It offered me the chance to explore a big, complex project that would call upon everything I'd ever learned about writing, interviewing, and researching. But first I'd have to overcome my well-entrenched panic about writing a B**K. For years the word was too daunting to spell out, even. But I began to admit that what I was craving might actually be a book.

In the beginning, I dreamed up something simple: a collection of oral histories from people on today's river. I explained my idea at Personal Pitch appointments during ASJA Conferences, trying to muster the courage to speak with confidence about the rich stories I had at my disposal. I received a smattering of vague interest. At one of these meetings, however, I let it slip to an agent that I actually knew all these people/stories through my job as an engineer on an antique fireboat. This stopped him in his tracks. He explained to me, quite charitably, that I had been burying the lede.

I had no intention of writing a memoir. I was interested in other people's stories, not my own. But the Personal Pitch meetings, along with the "First Pages" book proposal sessions I'd attended at annual conferences offered invaluable feedback. The scope of my evolving book grew ever clearer through conversations with editors and agents that stripped away any denial I had about the relevance of my own story to the book's message.

One of my goals was to reveal post-industrial America through a Hudson River lens, raising big questions about the cultural cost of the decline of hands-on work in the United States. As American society grows more virtual, less hands-on, I am a salmon swimming upstream. I had found myself spending more and more time engaged in physical work, shifting levers, turning wrenches, welding steel. Soon, I came to realize that my own transformation, from a dot-com editor working in the Empire State Building to a marine engineer, offered the perfect foil for the larger story—a ready vehicle for the telling. I took a Media Bistro proposal class, then spent months refining the 70-page document before submitting it to agents.

When the time came to sign on with an agency, I fielded multiple offers from agents I'd met through Personal Pitch. Ultimately, I signed on with Joy Tutela from the David Black Agency, encouraged not only by her professionalism and enthusiasm for the project, but also by the fact that she came highly recommended by an ASJA friend. My book could not have found a better champion. Joy helped me hone the proposal, shopped it around to editors, and set up a week of appointments.

On a Wednesday afternoon, Joy and I met in the polished black lobby of Simon & Schuster's building for our first scheduled meeting—this one with Free Press. When the publisher told me that reading my proposal made her want to put on overalls and do some hands-on work, I knew my concept had struck a chord. I walked out buzzing with anticipation. I had no idea, however, that a deal could unfold so quickly. By that evening Free Press had made an offer we couldn't refuse. And with much hard swallowing, giddiness, terror, and excitement I said yes.

Then the laborious process of researching and writing began. My ASJA pals did their best to keep me sane, and they helped me celebrate when my first book, My River Chronicles: Rediscovering America on the Hudson, finally came out in September. The hustle is far from over as I work to promote the book. But as always, ASJA has been there, with a conference full of sessions about author marketing, social media, and other tools I need for this next phase of the journey.

Jessica DuLong is an ASJA member and author of My River Chronicles: Rediscovering America on the Hudson. More at www.myriverchronicles.com