I'll give you a warning before I start, this isn't all pretty.  For those of you struggling to begin your writing careers, this story may make you want to give up.  Publishing is a tough business and the real sad thing is, I'm just past the first hard part.

1984 I started college at New Mexico Tech.  I'd tried writing a few short stories in high school, dreadful stuff.  In college I started out majoring in Technical Writing.  (I later switched to biology when I realized it would mean I could do my own experiments instead of writing about someone else's.)  My roommate first semester was a psychology major named Chuck Hawley.  He didn't really belong at Tech, his father was a professor.  He needed to be around other artists, so he moved on to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.  He played guitar and he introduced me to music I'd never heard of.  Cream, King Crimson, that sort of thing.  He also planted an idea in my head, an old rock musician, making a comeback, watching his young bandmates self destruct around him.  That idea took a while to percolate through my brain but it became the big idea that I thought I could spin into a novel.

1995  I had failed at writing a fantasy novel and succeeded at writing a really bad movie script.  I felt it was time to dust off the rock musician idea and take one more shot at writing a book.  I worked on it while I did a postdoctoral fellowship at National Jewish Medical Research Center in Denver.  It took me a year to write the first draft.

1996  I got myself down to the new public library in downtown Denver and started copying names out of the Writer's Marketplace.  Agents.  Anyone who handled science fiction and worked out of New York got a query letter.  The replies I got all amounted to the same thing. Not interested.  I kept at it.  One agent asked for the manuscript and I sent it.  Then Linn Prentiss asked to see it but wanted the submission to be exclusive.  Three months had gone by at the other place and no word, so I respectfully asked they send it back.  It came back unopened.

1997  I had sent the query to Virginia Kidd but Linn, their slush reader, intercepted it and took me on as a client at her own fledgling agency.  Linn was the first person, ever, to ask me for more.  So I sent her the book.  Linn had some notes.  A lot of notes.  First of all she said this book is different than all the other stuff that's selling out there and different is not good.  The other books that were selling were all huge, 200,000 words, rise and fall of mighty empires stuff.  But she saw something in RF and decided to take me on, provisionally.  I agreed to make the changes she wanted, and then to make the next round of changes, and so on.

1998  I finished my post-doc and move to Boston.  Linn had started sending the book around.  One editor made some positive noises and suggested a few changes.  I made those changes but by the time we were ready to send it back that publishing house had been bought and the editor was no longer buying science fiction.  So Linn kept shopping it around.

1999  Linn suggested I try writing some short fiction to get my name out there.  I take a two week vacation and write "Vasquez Orbital Salvage and Satellite Repair" which ended up at Asimov's.  I wrote some more stories and sold another one to Gardner.

2000  Linn and I had a dispute.  I don't need to go into the details here except to say that Linn never did anything wrong by me.  She helped RADIO FREEFALL become a real book, and for that I'm grateful to her.  We just couldn't work together.  I joined the Hal's Pals writing group that met in the Milton home of Hal Clement.

2001  Hal Clement introduced me to his editor, David Hartwell, at Readercon.  Hal told David about RADIO FREEFALL and David agreed to take a look at it.  I sent it the first week in September.  Understandably, he didn't get to it right away.

2002  Saw David at Boskone.  He hasn't read the book.  His wife had just had a baby and he didn't have any extra time.

2003  Saw David at Torcon.  He hasn't read the book.  He'd just finished editing The Hard SF Renaissance and he didn't have any extra time.

2004  Saw David at Noreascon.  He hasn't read the book.  He'd just had bypass surgery and he didn't have any extra time.  (I might have these excuses mixed up in time, but you get the gist.)

2005  Gave up on the whole idea of being a writer.

2006  Sold my last story, "City of Reason" to David for his Year's Best SF 11.  I told David that now that I was going to be in the Year's Best I'd give selling RF one more try.  Did he want to take a look at it before I sent it somewhere else?  Sure.  I sent him an RTF file.  Three months later he called me at work.  I listened to his message on voice mail and started in on the round of doubt and hope.  "OK, best case scenario, he want to buy the book.  Worst case, he's rejecting it.  Somewhere in the middle, he wants me to resubscribe to the New York Review of Science Fiction."  He bought it.  I about fell off my chair.  Remembering the humiliating experience of trying to find an agent a decade earlier, I decided I needed to try one more time.  I found the best agent I could, the guy who could handle everything I wanted to write, in Preditors and Editors.  I sent him an e-mail.  15 minutes later he called me.  I guess having a contract in hand makes all the difference.

I learned a lot about publishing in the following year.  Dates in the contract don't mean anything.  Editors don't edit first novels, they only buy novels that are ready to roll to the presses.  Writers are expected to operate at a loss for the first book or so to shoulder the burden of publicity.  I learned that nothing is final until the book hits the streets.

I also learned that some people want to talk to you about your book and some don't.  I learned that fans can make you very happy with just a quick e-mail.  And I learned how much fun it is to play with a huge box of your own book.