A Lesson in Life...and Publishing

Not always what they seem to be...

I was emailing last night with a new friend of mine in Alaska and telling him a bit about New York City. I told him stories of subway antics, dating woes, the works, and it reminded me that even people you think you know are not always what they seem. This is, of course, something I know very well--we all do--but a little remembering can't hurt when you're out there in the wild, wild world.

Given that, the article I read this morning on HuffingtonPost.com was very fitting. A story of a new author whose first agent turned out to be more than just a "hack":

Some people say life imitates art. Other people say art imitates life.

Here's a true story that clearly supports the "life imitates art" argument, and when it does, life can turn out stranger than the art it set out to imitate in the first place.

It goes like this: At the turn of the century I wrote the first draft of Hack, a novel which, after 12 years and several close calls has just been published by Harper Davis Publishers. In it, the protagonist fakes his own death and returns under a new identity to bilk fat sums of dough from greedy rich guys.

Hold that thought.

I signed on with my first literary agent, Melanie Mills of North Myrtle Beach, SC, on August 26 2002.

Dear Mr. Harrison: 

I have reviewed your work titled "Hack" and have reached a positive evaluation of the property. I feel this property could have a great market appeal and if you choose I would like to market this book for you.

A "positive evaluation of the property"? Hallelujah!

I worked on the manuscript through the winter and in the spring we submitted and got four "good" rejections. Melanie was encouraged: all four editors agreed Hack was a riveting story with quirky characters, but the premise was too far fetched to be believable.

Then it was Spring Break, and by chance I found an almost-free timeshare in Myrtle Beach, which in April promised family fun and a face-to-face meeting with my agent.

And so I went to meet Melanie Mills. Beyond the paved roads and onto rutted single tracks snaking between shacks on stilts crammed together, I found her: a tiny elf-like being, hunched over the deck railing of her falling-down shack. She was scraping at some old paint, a cig dangling from her lips, and a blonde wig, teased and blown into a platinum rat's nest, resting atop her pointy little head.

We sat on her deck overlooking the slough. She talked while I noticed that it smelled more like the county dump than the salty seashore. She showed me the handful of rejection letters as she pounded back Dr. Peppers, puffed on pack after pack of Dorals, and drawled like John Wayne on Dilaudid.

She even explained that her great legs (she stood up to show me) were due to six-miles-a-day beach walks. She also mentioned that she was hosting a writers' conference during a Harley rally in Myrtle Beach the following month, and another in the fall in Banff Lake Louise.

At her suggestion, when I got back to Fairfield County I made some broad brush changes to the manuscript, such as making the female protagonist "less of a bitch" (Melanie's words) and sent it back to her. Her assistant, Kat Baker told me that Melanie was traveling in Germany. I waited three weeks, and when I didn't hear from her, I contacted her office again. I received this email in reply:

Last week, during her trip to Europe due to a death in the family, Melanie Mills had a fatal car accident. Therefore, all submission to publishers have been retracted, all events cancelled, and all existing publishing contracts have been reverted over to the individual authors. I'm very sorry. This has been, and still is, a very emotional time for her entire family and friends, 

Good luck to all of you,

Kat Baker
Assistant to Melanie Mills

Never mind that she looked like Dobby with a fright wig and sounded like The Duke, I had sipped 7Up at her table in Myrtle Beach. We shared laughs. And we had talked about Hack, my story of faked death and identity fraud.

So, when I heard this news, I felt as if someone had kicked me in the crotch. I couldn't breath; I lost the feeling in my hands. And I bemoaned my bad luck. Now what was I going to do? My literary agent was dead!

I began scouting for a new agent. I didn't think it would be too hard -- "Hey, my agent died, would you mind reading a few chapters of the novel she was representing?"

I was right. I had many tire kickers right away, and by the following spring a new agent with a whole notebook full of new ideas for Hack. But somewhere along the line, someone suggested I look at the website "Writer Beware". And it was here that I discovered what really happened to Melanie Mills.

She didn't die in a car wreck in Germany. Not only did I learn that my former agent was still quite alive, but that she had roughly 15 aliases and that she was wanted for real estate fraud across the southern part of the United States, including, of course, Myrtle Beach.

She was also wanted for the attempted murder of her own mother who she pinned to a cement table with her car, crushing her pelvis.

Oddly enough, she had also published "a mystery novel under the pseudonym L.R. Thomas.

Her pitch letter to publishers began: "What would you do when your mother, who leads you to believe she had died, shows up months later and tries to kill you?"

Melanie Mills obviously had a thing for resurrection.

So how did she finally get caught? As it turns out, before she "died" she did organize that writers' conference in Banff Lake Louise, that she'd mentioned when I met with her. Ironically, she did not encourage me to register, supposedly because I already had an agent (her).

The conference advertised big name authors, publishers, and agents, all drooling to make a six-figure deal. She organized and published the schedule on a dedicated website, advertised on all the sites where unpublished writers troll for agents, deployed a reservation system and started collecting money.

After defrauding writers of the fees for the conference, she took off for Germany and was killed, unrecognizably mangled in a bloody wreck. Of course the planned conference attendees, upset though they were by her death, wanted their money back. But when the authorities went looking, they found not a trace -- no bank accounts, no real estate, nothing to indicate that she had ever existed.

And in Arkansas and Myrtle Beach, where she was wanted for real estate fraud and attempted murder, more authorities started to follow the her trail. With the help of Writer Beware, they made the connection between various aliases and found her. Last I heard, she has yet to be extradited to Arkansas to face attempted murder and fraud charges, and a judge had declared her unfit for trial: She'd shed her orange jumpsuit in the courtroom and was commando underneath, leading to a diagnosis of acute schizophrenia. I suppose she won't be doing any Martha Stewart-style hard time soon.

So we've got life imitating art all over the place here, and yet, Melanie Mills never charged me a nickel for her services. Usually literary agent con artists charge a reading fee, an editing fee, a submission fee and then they don't shop your book. I guess Melanie Mills was ever the anomaly, or perhaps playing legit with me was her way of thanking me for giving her the idea for her biggest con.

I will probably go to my grave wondering if Hack's fake death, and his return as a swingin', Harley-ridin', Mexican with a ponytail and pencil-thin mustache, along with his plan to rip off as many people as possible, got Melanie Mills thinking -- maybe such a plot isn't so far-fetched after all? I guess she found out.

Read the original post HERE

Eyes open, friends. Do your homework. Be careful and look out for yourself in all areas of your life!

The Capones: Not Such a Happy Family

Once and a while, I read book release news that makes me heave a sigh of relief. And not because it's exciting news and I'm just dying to read a book on whatever topic.

Instead, it's usually because something has exploded--or crashed and burned--with a recently contracted title that I saw by submission, a title that I thankfully put it in the ole "NO" column.

For example, this upcoming memoir by Deirdre Marie Capone, the great-niece of the notorious mobster Al Capone.

According to the Wall Street Journal, it seems the memoir is causing quite the stir:

Deirdre Marie Capone, a great niece of Al Capone, spent years concealing her connection to the legendary mobster. Like a lot of his relatives, she used a different last name. She even kept the family tie hidden from her children.

Now the 70-year-old Florida grandmother plans to reveal what it was like to grow up a Capone. Her book, "Uncle Al Capone," will be published in the fall, she says.

"I sat on his lap, I felt his scar," Ms. Capone says. "How many historians who wrote about him ever heard his voice?"

One potential audience isn't eager to read her opus: the other Capones.

"I wouldn't read it if somebody bought it for me," says Theresa Hall, a granddaughter of Al Capone. Katherine Seal, 43, a great-granddaughter, says, "What is the benefit to all this, you have to ask oneself? He's been dead for 60 or 70 years. Why keep rehashing it?"

The book isn't the only thing dividing the Capone clan these days. Some relatives are up in arms about another author, Chris Knight Capone, who claims to be a grandson of Al.

The 38-year-old New Yorker filed a lawsuit in Chicago last year to have the mobster's remains exhumed so he can obtain genetic proof of his ancestry. Mr. Capone hired a ghostwriter and self-published a book, "Son of Scarface," in 2008.

Members of the Capone family long tried to keep a low profile, forgoing the opportunity to cash in on their infamous relative's name. Most live modest, middle-class lives. No living relative has been linked to organized crime. Al Capone, who died in 1947, left no will and no inheritance, family members say.

Now that some Capones—authentic or not—are going public with their stories, relatives are bickering. And money may be at stake. Deirdre Marie Capone says she intends to work with other relatives to set up a company to license rights to the Capone name and likeness in California, where state laws are favorable for asserting publicity rights for dead celebrities. Chris Knight Capone says he, too, would like to assert publicity rights. "I want to get what my family deserves," he says.

"He has absolutely no proof of anything he says," says Deirdre Marie Capone.

Says Chris Knight Capone: "My proof is my blood."

[...]

[Dierdre Marie Capone] says the work will show a different side of Al Capone. "When you have Capone blood in you and you see him portrayed as an absolute monster on films, it really makes you angry," she says.

Ms. Hall, a Californian whose late father, Albert "Sonny" Capone, was Al Capone's son, says she won't read it because she is furious about revelations in another book. In Get Capone, published this year by Simon & Schuster, author and former Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Eig cites Deirdre Marie Capone as claiming that Sonny Capone was the son not of Al Capone's wife, Mae, but of a young woman who died during childbirth.

"You probably could have stuck a knife in my heart," says Ms. Hall, who is in her fifties and knew Mae Capone as her grandmother. "It is totally, completely false."

Deirdre Marie Capone says she feels bad that Ms. Hall is upset. "I thought this was something that everybody in the family knew about," she says. Mr. Eig says he attributed the information to Deirdre Marie Capone, and Ms. Hall didn't talk to him, so "I have nothing to add."

While Deirdre Marie Capone was polishing her manuscript in the last few years, Chris Knight Capone was working on his. [...]

Read the entire article HERE

I'm not sure what this kind of publicity will do for book sales exactly, but it will probably help up the numbers--even if the book isn't as interesting and well-written as some may think. I'm just happy not to be involved in some book-hate from the Capone family, or any potential lawsuits.

Dodged that bullet.

Serial Book Thief Jailed...Again.

Move over, Markus Zusak, there's a new Book Thief in the house.

The big house, that is.

According to The Telegraph UK, Cambridge University alum William Jacques has been sentenced to three and a half years in jail for stealing over £1 million in antique books from a London Library:

Cambridge University graduate William Jacques, who stole £1 million of rare books in the late 1990s, drew up a "thief's shopping list" as he continued his life of crime.

He used a false name to sign in to the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library in London before stuffing valuable books under his tweed jacket and fleeing, Southwark Crown Court in London was told.

Recorder Michael Holland QC told Jacques: "You have absolutely no intention of turning away from what seems to you to be an extremely lucrative and easy crime."

Such crimes "undermine and destroy parts of the cultural heritage that's contained within these libraries", the judge said.

The judge, who said Jacques had no mitigation, told him: "You are a Cambridge graduate and should know better, I suppose."

He went on: "This was a systematic and carefully-planned theft and you had prepared what, in my view, was a target list, from your research at that library, of books that were worth stealing.

"This was a theft in progress and the list referred to books worth tens of thousands of pounds more.

"Your entire motivation was commercial and you intended to make whatever money you could from the theft of these books despite their cultural value.

"The effect of your criminality was to undermine and destroy parts of the cultural heritage that's contained within these libraries and make it more difficult for those who have a legitimate interest in these books to gain access to them because libraries have to take inconvenient and expensive steps to stop thefts of this kind."

Jacques was "relying on the reluctance of library staff to challenge people" when they were used to dealing with members of the public whom they could trust, the judge said.

Jacques, 41, previously plundered more than £1 million of historic books from the UK's leading libraries in the biggest haul of its kind in British legal history.

The serial book thief, who escaped with some 500 extremely rare antiquarian books, hid behind a "shabby cloak of respectability" as he went on to sell them at auction houses in the late 1990s, judge Derek Inman said in May 2002.

Motivated by arrogance, greed and an obsession with money, the loner raided the nation's libraries, devastating their collections and damaging valuable works in an attempt to disguise their origins.

Even a four-year jail sentence, imposed by Judge Inman at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court for 21 counts of theft, could not stop him.

In the latest case, the jury heard that Jacques would regularly visit the Lindley Library in Vincent Square, central London, which holds books, journals, pictures and art on practical gardening, garden history, plants and design dating back to 1514.

Read the rest of the article HERE

Huh. Talk about strange addictions. I gotta say that judge was pretty kick-ass.

Boise Elder Makes Mayo-Book Sandwich? Huh?

So, the insanity here continues, so again, I apologize for my absence (this is why I need more guest bloggers!). It's not only insane in my little Danielle-bubble, though. An Idaho woman is also bringing on the crazy--with condiments.

The Associated Press announced late last night that an elderly woman--Joy Cassidy, according to The Weekly Vice)--in Boise has been going on a spree of condiment-related crimes. Her most recent hit? Pouring mayonaisse in a book drop at a local library:

Police said a 74-year-old woman arrested after pouring mayonnaise in the Ada County library's book drop box is a person of interest in a yearlong spree of condiment-related crimes of the same sort. The woman was arrested Sunday at the library, moments after police said she pulled through the outside drive-through and dumped an open jar of mayonnaise in the box designated for reading materials.

The woman was released from the county jail and faces a misdemeanor charge of malicious injury to property. Police did not disclose a motive.

Boise police said the woman is under investigation for at least 10 similar cases of vandalism since May 2009. Library employees have reported finding books in the drop box covered in corn syrup and ketchup.

See the post from the AP HERE

Also check out a hysterical and detailed account of the crime from The Weekly Vice HERE

Those of you who know me personally are fully aware of my hatred of condiments. That said, if I were a librarian and found the book drop full of any such substance, I would likely be scarred for life. This I know.

What I don't know, however, is why on earth does this woman find it necessary to dump condiments in a book drop? Is it simply a case of dementia, or just a really intense hatred of the written word?