This might make a good book!

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

The Summer of 2020 has delivered both nightmares and dreams. Not even my overactive imagination could conjure up the scenario where I sign my first book contract, at age 59, in the middle of a raging pandemic, and just after getting news that I soon will be a grandfather. Wow, that’s blockbuster stuff!

I am not the first old person to be a new author. Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first book Little House in the Big Woods in 1932 at age 65, after working as a teacher, dressmaker, news editor, and farm loan clerk. Richard Adams, after years as an English civil servant, published Watership Down when he was 52. Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes was published when he was 66. Before that, McCourt was a dockworker, bank clerk, and teacher.

As a nerd/kid, I always wanted to be a writer and/or a lawyer. As a result, I behaved oddly at times. I dropped by the courthouse to watch hearings. I hand-wrote my own four column four page “newspaper.” I filled it with neighborhood and national news, rolled it up, and tossed it on the neighbor’s front porch. They never subscribed.

I argued a lot. Not just with my poor siblings, but also in debate and mock trials. I started/edited newspapers at both my high school and grade school. My first job not involving fast food was an exciting summer spent as a hometown newspaper cub reporter. I wrote for my college newspaper and later earned a few dollars writing movie reviews during law school.

I have been blessed to follow both the writing dream and the law dream, in varying degrees at various times. Like Wilder, Adams, and McCourt, I have never quit my “day job” while I wrote. Indeed, the economic responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood demanded that I pursue my love of lawyering full-time, at least until the last little O’Brien bird flew out of the nest.

When that finally happened about five years ago, there was more time for writing. There were stories rattling around in my head about my unusual boyhood years spent with and near the Trappist monks who used to live in Huntsville, Utah. The only way to quiet the rattling noise was to write the stories down, so I did.

What followed was a four year crash course on how not to publish a book. With brash overconfidence, I sent my unedited and unrefined manuscript to a dozen publishers. A few politely declined any interest in the manuscript. Most never even responded.

I wondered why. I found out why when my sister told me the book sounded like a boring class room lecture. A friend told me not to write like a lawyer. So I started over.

I tried to write stories instead of legal briefs. I hired a professional editor (Lisa Carricaburu) to rework the text and stories. I read books about writing and started a blog for practice, to keep me in the habit of writing something every week. Eventually, with help from friends and family, the book got better, so I chatted up my network to see who might be interested in publishing it.

We have a book club at our law firm. My fellow club member and law partner Jim Peters knew what I was doing. He told his friend Kelly Hughes (a Chicago book publicist) and sent her one of my blog posts. She agreed to talk with me, and then convinced her friend—book editor and agent Joe Durepos— to do so too.

Joe politely agreed to read a chapter, as a favor to Kelly. A month or two later, he called back and said he’d try to help me publish the book. It was, to shamelessly plagiarize Rick Blaine from Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Another of Joe’s associates has called him a Jedi master for writers and publishing. It’s true. Joe has an uncanny ability to simultaneously inspire your dreams of publication but also ground them in reality. His expertise, wisdom, and guidance helped create this summer’s confluence of pandemic, grandfatherhood, and book contract.

Well, let me clarify. Joe neither claims nor gets blame/credit for the pandemic or the grandfather thing. However, we are both excited to work with author/editor Jon Sweeney and his team at Paraclete Press to make the book—tentatively titled Monastery Mornings—ready for publication in the Spring of 2021. Stay tuned!

By then, the grandbaby will be here, COVID-19 gone (hopefully), and then I may find myself in the pleasant company of Wilder, Adams, and McCourt. By “company,” of course, I don’t presume that I will be a great and successful author. That chapter is not yet written. Instead, I simply mean I will be one of those old codgers who kept plugging away at a dream of writing and publishing a book until it finally happened.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. I just may write a book about it someday.

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah will be published in the Spring of 2021.