I called Falcon with my two queries on the desk in front of me, in case I forgot what was so compelling about my books. But I didn’t need my cheat sheets. The editor, Erin Turner, was enthusiastic, and her enthusiasm made my own easy to express. She asked to see queries for both projects.

Within days (in my experience good news from publishing houses comes fast, bad news more slowly) she called to tell me she wanted to take both books to committee where a final decision would be made. She was nearly positive Falcon would offer to buy a revised cougar book. She was less sure of the rafting book, but she would push for it. She liked it. And Falcon wanted to add memoirs and nonfiction adventure narratives to its stable, so there was a good chance.

Her next call was one of those good news/bad news conversations. Falcon wanted the cougar book. The marketing folks had balked at Anything Worth Doing.

They wanted books of that type, Erin explained, but the key to their marketing strategy was that such books needed to generate their own media. The author or subject or the events had to be newsworthy. What I had done was write about events already gone stale with age; people nobody ever heard of; and rivers famous mostly inside the river-running community.

Please note that these are the same objections my friends and family leveled more than three years previous, before I typed word one of the outline.

I tried to believe that the book’s latest revision was still not good enough to pull the thing out of its assigned niche and into good mainstream storytelling, but I couldn’t. I was positive, despite almost zero encouragement from any sector that mattered, that I now had a really nice little book that a wide range of readers would enjoy, that I could promote and represent, that I should be able to publish.

I decided to set the manuscript aside yet again. Maybe after time passed I’d see it for a failure and be able to let it go. Maybe they’d all been right. Maybe I was a good writer with a crappy instinct for a marketable story.