It’s not pretty. It’s not romantic. It came out of a very pragmatic need to make a living and be a stay-at-home mom. But it was never a burning desire growing up. I had other ambitions. I wrote for fun and for myself. I finished my first novel—a tolkienesque fantasy adventure saga—when I was sixteen, a 400 page handwritten piece that isn’t that bad. I wrote several more but they were not for the eyes of others. Even my husband didn’t know I wrote books.

I had a very fulfilling and well-paid career as a graphic designer and art director, at first working in other people’s offices and then on my own as a freelancer. I really enjoyed the work and I was good at it. But when I semi-retired to have a baby and decided when my son was a toddler to get back into it, I soon discovered that the whole graphics industry had turned to computers, when I, alas, had not. And without money for training and for the very expensive Macintosh computer I would need to compete, there was no way to get back into it. And besides, I had learned that I enjoyed the slower pace of life at home with my son. Did I really want to get back into the hectic world of advertising design? But what else could I do where I could make a living and stay at home? I know! I’ll sit down, learn to use the hand-me-down PC that we were given, and write historical novels. I told my husband of this new career move for me and he was, as always, very supportive, but he did ask me with some concern, “Do you write novels?”

Of course! I knew how to write. How hard could it be?

Famous last words. I had researched the industry, though. I did know I needed an agent, and to learn to write killer query letters. But I also needed that manuscript, so I wrote and wrote, and rewrote and rewrote. And with one manuscript in hand, went in search of an agent. That journey took three years. But I didn’t sit on my hands. I wrote three more novels in the interim. That way, if they liked my writing but not necessarily that book, I could offer them other manuscripts. A writer writes, right? I’d show them I was no one-trick pony, that I was serious about a career.

My first agent actually did place a novel with a small publisher, but they went out of business before they could go to press. After that, we didn’t have any luck, and after three years with her trying to peddle several more of my manuscripts, we parted amicably. I went in search of a fresh new agent, and found her at a writer’s conference in San Diego, where editors and agents critiqued a small portion of your manuscript. I figured that this was a better intro to my books than a cold chat at the cocktail party, and I am terrible at approaching people I don’t know in that way (you wouldn’t know that from meeting me, but I am).

At this point I was still writing historical fiction. The kind I liked to write, was, unfortunately, not the kind editors wanted to publish. I liked writing about ordinary people in the middle ages under extraordinary circumstances, giving short shrift to the courts and the kings and queens of Europe. I figured they get enough press, and it seemed more interesting to me to deal with the real people, the people I would have met.

But after many years of writing these books—and I continued to write one a year—and after my second agent flaked away after 9/11, and I fired my third for not communicating with me, not sending out my manuscripts, and for the distressing news I had heard from others that she wasn’t paying her clients—I decided to go it alone.
All told, that was ten years. Ten years of rejections. Of constantly writing and honing my craft while caring for a child and working part time on weekends. (So I laugh a little when I hear writers say how they struggled for six whole months trying to get an agent and decided to give up and self-publish).

It was about this time that my first agent, with whom I was still friends, suggested I switch to writing medieval mysteries. It was a bigger market, she said. There were imprints of big publishers who just sold mysteries. There were independent bookstores devoted to exclusively selling mysteries. There were mystery fan conventions.

But weren’t mysteries written by a special brand of clever people, Jessica Fletcher types, who, when called upon, could solve real life crimes?

I soon learned that that was not true. There were all kinds of mysteries, and medieval mysteries were just one subgenre of them. Didn’t I love the Brother Cadfael mysteries, after all? So I sat down and hashed out what kind of medieval mystery I wanted to write. I noticed the genre was heavy on monk and nun detectives, but I didn’t want to write that. I wanted action! Adventure! Romance! And I wanted a distinctly darker tone. I wanted someone one was specifically hired to do the job, like a medieval private eye. The more I thought about that sort of cross-pollination between a hardboiled detective and the medieval setting, the better it sounded. No one else was doing it, and it might push my books above the crowd. So I came up with the notion of “Medieval Noir,” and devised a sleuth with all the tropes of a hardboiled detective: a lone wolf; a man with a chip on his shoulder and down on his luck; a hard-drinking, hard fighting, hard talking no-nonsense sort of man, able to use his fists as well as his brain to get out of scrapes; and he’d be a sucker for a dame in trouble. All this would be played straight and kept historically accurate. My detective was a knight and lord but lost it all because of an ill-chosen decision seven years ago to commit treason. All the others in the conspiracy were executed, but only his life was spared because his former mentor John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, spoke up for him. So Crispin Guest would lose his wealth, his status, his title, everything that defined him and he would have to reinvent himself on the mean streets of London as the “Tracker,” a man hired to find lost objects, lost people, and the occasional murder for sixpence a day…plus expenses.

I wrote three books in the series, and since I hadn’t written a series before, I had to see if I could write with the same character over and over, and landed my fourth and, so far, final agent. The first book in the series, CUP OF BLOOD, was rejected everywhere, including my eventual publisher St. Martin’s. So we put that book to bed and wheeled out the second—now the first—VEIL OF LIES. At the same time, some fourteen months after the editor at St. Martin’s rejected CUP OF BLOOD, he contacted my agent and told him that he couldn’t get those characters out of his head and did the author have another book in that series he could look at? Why yes. Yes, she did. And it was VEIL OF LIES that he bought in 2007, and it was released as my first published book in 2008. I wrote six more in the series and published those with St. Martin’s. They all received critical acclaim, and every one of them was nominated multiple times for industry awards. But due to low sales, the publisher decided not to publish any more of them.

Yet I wasn’t done telling my tale of the disgraced knight turned detective. So I brushed off the dust from CUP OF BLOOD while my agent searched for a new publisher for the series, gave it a hefty rewrite, and self-published it in July, and so far, sales have been pretty darned good. We did land another publisher for the series, but now I know that, if necessary, I can self-publish my own Crispin Guest books.

After fourteen years of struggle, another six of publishing traditionally, it’s good to know you have options.

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Jeri keeps all her options open, including writing a character blog in Crispin’s voice. You can find that, an excerpt of CUP OF BLOOD, book discussion guides, and a series book trailer for her Crispin Guest series on her website www.JeriWesterson.com.