A former government bureaucrat,
Stu Mirsky studied philosophy in his undergraduate years and traveled about a
bit, during and after college, including spending time in parts of the Middle East,
Africa and Europe. In his early early twenties he took up the martial arts and
attained a second degree karate black belt but decided he'd done about as much
fighting as he really wanted to do in his life in 1976 and gave it up to be a
full time father and husband.
Always in love with writing, Mirsky wrote and submitted
short fiction and a number of articles in his early post-college years, but
threw this aside when his wife pointed out that, with one child on the way and
more in the planning stage, he'd better get serious. And so he took the first
job that came his way, a low level civil service position with lots of field
work.
Still, he remained carefree for a number of years (all the
while writing, on and off, in his spare time) until a local municipal crisis
saw him laid off and out of work again, scaring the bejeezis out of his wife
(who was pregnant again). So Mirsky bought a couple of suits and ties and
started hitting the pavement. He ended up in another civil service job and this
time turned himself into a bureaucratic dynamo, writing fiction and such all
but forgotten.
After several years and a number of developments in the
various agencies in which he worked, years that ultimately saw him rise to a
low level managerial position in one city agency, he found himself again in
transition. New elections had resulted in a change at the top of his agency and
there was little work to be done while the big players sorted themselves out. A
colleague, who had been a modestly successful film producer in an earlier life,
asked him one day if he had any stories worth filming (since his friend wanted
to get back into that business).
"Well, yes," Mirsky said, "One or two. But I
never finished writing any of them."
"Why not finish one now?" asked his friend.
Since things were slow and he had lots of time to think and
daydream, he said sure, why not, and went home to pull out one of his old
manuscripts, a tale he had titled “The King of
Vinland's Saga”, about vikings and Indians in 11th century North America.
It was handwritten (Mirsky had never learned to type).
When he asked his wife to type it for him, she asked if he
was nuts? "It's about time you learned to type for yourself," she
told him. "I've done enough of that in my day."
So over the course of two years, on the weekends, he sat down
at the computer screen and began banging away. After typing in the first
chapter, the material just seemed too immature for the now forty-something
Mirsky and he started writing from scratch. He began typing the material in
1994 and by 1996 he had a completed manuscript. He was one hell of a typist by
then besides. (He once estimated the whole thing actually took approximately
108 days, based on one writing day a week over the two years.)
He promptly handed the manuscript to his friend who then
shared it with a screenwriter colleague. The three of them finally met over
lunch to talk about it. "What do you think?" Mirsky asked, hiding the
tremor in his voice as best he could.
"Well," said the screenwriter, "you have to
understand there are a lot of issues here. It's too long for one thing.
Bringing something like this to film, well . . ." His voice was
unforgiving and severe.
Mirsky got up from the table (they were in a local eatery in
midtown Manhattan) and said "Thanks. I did my best but some things can't
be helped, I guess."
"Where are you going?" asked the screenwriter.
"I've got to get back," said Mirsky. "I'm
sorry you didn't like it..."
"Who said that?"
"Well . . ." Mirsky muttered.
"I'm just trying to be frank with you about how hard
this is gonna be. I actually think it's pretty good."
Mirsky sat down again, the dinner tasting much better in his
mouth. The three of them spoke for about an hour and then parted, agreeing to
see what they could pull together, between them. But nothing ever developed
from that meeting since his friend, the former producer, was unable to find
backers and the screenwriter said he wasn't interested in doing anything on
spec.
A month or so later, Mirsky called the screenwriter and said,
"What do I do now?"
"Get it published," said the screenwriter who was
too busy to offer much more than that.
"How do I do it?" Mirsky asked. But he already knew
and so began two years of sending the material out to one publisher and agent
after another, and two years of steady, relentless rejections. It reminded of
him of the days when he'd first graduated college and tried to turn himself
into a writer.
Meanwhile, the job he'd had metamorphosed into a new one and
soon he found himself moving up the bureaucratic ladder until he finally
settled into a much more demanding slot as a fairly high level city manager, a
job that began to take more and more of his time. By 1998, Mirsky decided to
give up trying to publish his novel and just stuff the whole thing away in a
drawer again, with all the other material he'd stuffed there from earlier
years. Then he heard about something called POD.
Print-on-Demand publishing combines the power of digitization
(digitized manuscripts and digital printing) with the reach of the internet
through on-line book distribution and selling. Because these features,
together, allow custom printing of books at a relatively cheap price and access
for viewing and purchasing on-line, self-publishing becomes amazingly cost
effective. So Mirsky decided to shell out the small amount of cash needed to
turn his manuscript into a real book via POD.
By December 1998, after much travail, manuscript preparation
and review, the book was out. Remarkably, it got an early positive review from
someone in the Midwest who Mirsky had never met and, when she posted her
comments on Amazon.com, the
book's sales actually took off.
The book's amazon "page" began to take shape:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0738801526
In fact the book sold so well that Mirsky was actually
encouraged to take an opportunity, when it came along, to re-direct his
pursuits and it wasn't long before he began to call himself a writer again,
rather than a bureaucrat . . . an appellation he'd always bridled at anyway.
Today he's writing steadily, including a regular column in a
local newspaper and other article placements here and there, with a couple of
new novels in the hopper. He's also published a compendium of some of his
favorite articles in a book titled "Irregularities: Tidal Flows and
Politics Along the Rockaway Shore":
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1413469086
It doesn't sell nearly as well as the historical novel about
Vikings in the New World but Mirsky was happy to see it in print anyway. He
recently completed a stint editing a soon to be released Holocaust memoir for
which he wrote the foreword, as well.
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