If a tree falls in the forest …
In school, I (Dan) was always a good student in math, science, and history. English Language Arts (ELA), on the other hand, was a different story. This is actually typical of engineers (my day job). Don't get me wrong, I would get A’s in ELA but it wasn’t natural (like math) and it wasn’t much fun. I would do the minimum amount of work to get there, at least in high school. The first day of class after summer break was a tough one for me because inevitably, I didn't do the summer reading book and I was doing my best to hide it. I was never much of a reader when I was young.
If you’d asked my younger self, “Do you think you’ll be a best-selling author someday?” I would’ve laughed—hard. And now you might be thinking, “Dan, isn’t it a bit bold to call yourself a best-selling author before the book’s even published?” Fair point. But I say: optimism counts. Besides, this is really a logic puzzle. If you’re reading this, then something’s working. If you’re not… well, it’s like that old proverb: If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, did it really make a sound? In this case, no. No forest … No tree … No Readers… Just silence.
But since you are reading this, it made a big sound… huge … deafening
Timeline to a novel
The long version of how we got here
My daughters, Emily and Danielle, and I started reading The Boxcar Children during our Disney World vacation in the Fall of 2017. Danielle was almost five years old and Emily was seven. There are over 160 Boxcar books and we started reading two to four chapters a night, sometimes more. Daniel l three girls would always joke that the Boxcar Children never aged a day in their adventures. The protagonist in the story, Henry (14), Jesse (12), Violet (10), and Benny (6), went through 160 adventures in suspended time.
By the time 2020 came around, we had read over a hundred of those books and we had the formula down. Each Boxcar Children book has about ten chapters … a little over a hundred pages. During the first couple chapters, the reader is introduced to the mystery and three or four suspects. They drop clues on why it might be any of the suspects.
At some point, my girls and I started an M&M rewards game to guess who we thought would be the guilty one. You would get an m&m for every chapter that was left before you made your call. In addition, you could double down meaning that you were so confident that your choice was locked in for good. If you were right, then you got double the amount of M&M’s.
Fast forward to December 2020. The world is still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. My kids are doing virtual school and I’m doing work virtually. Danielle, Emily, and I had recently finished reading an Encyclopedia Brown book from Libby. At this point in our nighttime reading routine we were cycling between Encyclopedia Brown and The Boxcar Children books. We decided to write our own short stories. Danielle wrote a mystery about a unicorn and I wrote a short story called “Encyclopedia Brown Makes Waves.” We spent a few days writing and really enjoyed telling our own story.
Writing our own story was fun but there still were lots of books to read so we put writing aside for a little while and even branched out into other story lines like Ava and Carol mysteries. Boxcar Children was still our favorite at the time. Our story telling would come at night right before Danielle would go to bed. Our nighttime routine finished with Danielle and I making up a story about Santa’s reindeer and the different places they would travel that night. Their toots would create fog and sometimes they would do funny things while other times they were relaxing on the beach. We called these the Reindeer Chronicles. My wife Kelly would also make up stories with Danielle but they got to talk about the unicorns, fairies and mermaids. Because, duh, those all go together 🙂
All the while we talked about making our own book. Even though we enjoyed writing a story about Encyclopedia Brown, we knew he was not the character that we could write about. We needed characters of our own. We debated back and forth on whether we wanted a book akin to Encyclopedia Brown which is a collection of short stories or a longer story like the Boxcar Children. One night, I had a dream that said why can’t we have both. Could we weave a few short mysteries into one longer running mystery kind of like how the TV shows like NCIS do it?
“Wiki’s Wonder Crew” is Born
We started in earnest brainstorming our new book on the first Saturday of May in 2022. In my house, this is known as derby day where we like to print out the list of horse names racing in the Kentucky Derby and everyone takes a horse to go with… no betting money, just the pride of knowing you were right. That was the day that Danielle and I took out the iPad and my computer and started brainstorming ideas on a Google slides presentation. Who would our characters be? What kind of traits might they have? Where would our book be set in? What might the mystery be?
I always liked how the Boxcar Children would have mysteries in different settings. Sometimes they were solving the mystery in their hometown of Greenfield while at other times they were on vacation on the beach. They were always independently solving the mystery and working as a team. However, we also liked the super genius of Encyclopedia Brown who observes little details that no one noticed. So why not have both. Introducing Melvin “Wiki” Jones. He’s the Encyclopedia Brown of the modern times. A Wiki is a website that is curated by its community. The most well known being Wikipedia where countless number of people go to use as their online encyclopedia.
Wiki, our character, is a boy genius who has a heart of gold. He internalizes things that go wrong, even when it's not his fault and always wants to do the right thing, no matter the cost. The journey in the book has him following the path of learning to trust his gut and depend on your true friends. Wiki has his crew of friends who will do anything for each other.
Kayla is Wiki’s best friend. The yin to his yang. She is smart, athletic and funny. They were next door neighbors at the nursery ward. Now thirteen years later, the best friends secretly like each other more than friends but are both too shy and worried about what it would do to the friendship to propose anything more than the status quo.
Olivia is Kayla’s older sister. She is the fashionable one of the group that can make friends with anyone. She is the motherly figure always looking after the rest.
Matthew is Wiki’s ten-year-old younger brother. Wiki is a little embarrassed that his younger brother is as tall as him. To Wiki's credit, Matthew is big for his age. He's so big and athletic that he already has the middle school football coaches recruiting him. Matthew is impulsive, doing things first and thinking about them later. He is also loud.
Going back to that first Saturday of May, 2021, with it being Derby day, we wrote our first chapter about a horse race mystery. We did not exactly know where we were going to take the rest of the story. Our new main character Wiki Jones was with his best friend Kayla and trying to save the day for Wiki’s cousin who was a jockey in the big race.
Our Recipe To Writing
After we wrote our first chapter and did some brainstorming, we stepped back and took a more structured approach to our writing. We took a high level view of what we wanted to happen in the book. We wrote it down in more googled slides. Then we broke it down per chapter. We took out a Google doc and would write a chapter title and a few bullet points of what we wanted to happen. Then we did another pass at it and added more detail.
At this point we knew roughly what we wanted to happen. Things can change as you get to the next chapter. New ideas spawn changes later (or earlier) in the book.
So we started writing the chapters. The nice thing about Google documents is you can concurrently write on the same document and see what the other person is writing. So this is what we started doing. Each of us would have our own device and we would convert the bulleted points of what we wanted to happen into sentences and paragraphs. If there was a conversation happening in the book, Danielle would take one character and I would take the other.
Danielle would mix in the silly stuff because sometimes I can be a little too serious. Of course I was in charge of fixing grammar and punctuation but Google and Microsoft make that much easier in this day and age.
We would write for an hour or two per night. What really helped us is we went on two road trips that summer. We took one road trip to Florida in June. Then another road trip to the badlands, South Dakota. At this point in 2022, the world had come back from COVID but we still took precautions. We didn’t fly. It’s cheaper to drive plus you can take more beach toys 🙂. The other nice thing about a road trip is there is plenty of time to write and so that is what we did. These supercharged our writing to get over half the book done.
When the fall came along, Danielle started fourth grade. We continued to write at night while still reading some of our favorite series. By the time Christmas break came along, we were on our last chapters and finally finished the first iteration of the book around New Years. It would be an understatement to say we were proud of ourselves. We always wrote this book with the intention of publishing it. But now what?
Query Away
There are about 5 major book publishers in the U.S (aside from Amazon). Unfortunately, they don’t talk to mere mortals like me. They really only want to talk to Book Agents who have vetted the book and are working on the authors behalf to get them to buy the rights to publish it. At this point in the process, Danielle bowed out. She likes writing original work but is not too fond of editing / rewriting sections of the book nor did I want to involve her with the likely rejection that we might encounter.
There are some helpful sites on the internet where you can craft an email to the book agent and the community evaluates what you wrote. In these emails, you need to catch the agent with your hook (what makes the reader want to read the book). And you need to give them some of the story and the statistics about your book (e.g. number of words). You also need to give them comps to other books that your book might be like. But, don’t compare it to a series that’s too big (e.g. Harry Potter), otherwise you’re too egotistical to think you could write that. Make sure that the comps was published in the last 5 years.
Houston, we have a problem
So this is where the trouble starts. If we want to be real about what we wrote, The first book that we wrote together (The Gold Cup Culprit) really was comparable to Encyclopedia Brown and The Boxcar Children. Although they are still publishing new stories for the Boxcar Children, no one seriously considers those as modern. The first Boxcar book was originally written in the early twentieth century. Also those are too big of series to compare to.
My first query letter that I had my fellow authors review pretty much said as much as well as mentioning my hook wasn’t good enough and I went too much into world building. I revised a couple times and finally said to myself, “We’re going to go with it. What do I have to lose?”
So, I sent out my first batch of queries to various book agents. Again there is a nice site that helps you keep track of this. I sent off twentyish queries hoping for the best but expecting the worst. In the first couple days, I got what I expected, a bunch of form rejection letters.
At the same time that I was querying, we passed a copy of The Gold Cup Culprit to some of Danielle’s friends to have them read it. When they finally got around to reading it for use, they gave us some good feedback. One of their comments was that we really liked the book but we want to hear about how they became nicknamed Wiki’s Wonder Crew. In the book, we had written a couple paragraphs of back story describing how they got their name. In the same month that our neighbor friends said that, we also received similar feedback from a book agent. The book agent would want to read the first book to consider the second.
Pivot to Book 0, Bring on the Cyber Heist
At the point where we received the feedback, we were brainstorming our next book and this led to the decision to cut what we were doing and create a “book 0” since The Gold Cup Culprit was “book 1.”
Writing Cyber Heist went more smoothly as we had experience writing The Gold Cup Culprit but we had started reading other books series looking for what makes a compelling read. One thing that drove us when writing Cyber Heist was the thought of how do we keep the reader saying, “just over more page.”
Cyber Heist took longer to write than the gold cup culprit as it was over twice the length. Again I queried book agents and again I was unsuccessful. I made the decision to self publish using Amazon. I paid a developmental editor to review our book and she gave great feedback. Her first statement about the book gave me hope that we could be successful. She wrote, “I’ve worked on numerous Reedsy projects this summer, and honest-to-goodness this one was the most well-written, enjoyable, and age/genre appropriate of them all. Congratulations on creating an engaging, fun story. You two wrote a book!! That’s a huge accomplishment. HUGE. I hope you celebrate that, because not very many people who set out to write a book actually do so.”
In life, I have faith that things happen for a reason. In this case, I think it was time to open up to the world which I don't believe I would have nearly done the work myself had we gotten an agent. So “Hello World. I look forward to meeting you.”