I'd like to explain how I got started writing a book.
I was at the Eastern States Nine-ball Champions in New Bedford MA. and after I played one of my matches, Mike X., the tournament director, introduced me to Peter Griffin. Peter was, and maybe, still is, a writer. He was researching material and looking to write a book about pool. We talked for some time and during our conversation I told him I always had a story in the back of my mind. What happened to Eddie Felson after he walked out of Ames pool-hall? I told him some of my ideas and suggested he write this story. He looked at me and said,"Why don't you write it?" Having little back-round writing anything I told Peter he was crazy. He offered to help and when I returned home I began writing. I sent him the story several months later. It wasn't very good. He made numerous corections and sent it back to me. I started to catch on a little and eventually ended up with a short story of roughly seventy-five hundred words. I had a lot of paragraphs thrown together and a grand finale last chapter. My characters included Eddie Felson and Vincent from the Color of Money. Big Mistake.
Mr. Griffin had some friends in pretty high places. He got friendly with the widow of Walter Tevis. He managed to convince her to talk to me about using her husband's characters. It didn't go well. Mr. Tevis fantasized that he was Eddie Felson and his widow told me she would take legal action if I used the characters. I had to go to plan B.
I started over using my own characters and my own story. I honestly feel Mrs. Tevis did me a favor in the long run. It would have been difficult trying to compete with such a classic group of characters, Mr. Tevis had already created.
I went back to the beginning. My paragraphs became chapters. I eventually wrote a very long story. Three hundred and fifty two thousand words. Hand printed on lined composition paper in notebooks. Another big mistake. Editors charge by the word. I self-published after dealing with rejection for several months. My story is now roughly one hundred and twenty thousand words. Not bad for a kid that paid for a ten page paper in high school so he could pass English and graduate.
Here's the first page or so of my story:
August 1998. A few months after the completion of the United States Nine-ball Tournament, ESPN televises the rerun of the last six matches. While one of the matches is being aired, twenty-three year old Johnny Jordan sits in his southern California home watching. He's a few weeks away from returning to college for his final year and has become very interested in the game of pool. He sits perchedin front of the televisionwith his elbows on his knees watching the match. One of the men involved in the match is Billy Bates; Johnny has fallen in love with the way Billy plays the game. Johnny is in such awe of of the way Billy shoots that he calls his mother as she comes up the stairs leading to the family room. He says,"Mom, you gotta come over and watch this guy playing pool. He's by far the best player I've ever watched play.
Elaine, Johnny's mom, has been going all day and she is looking forward to watching something she might enjoy. But she humors her son and watches the pool match, which has him glued to the television. When she sits down in her usual seat, the younger man is at the table, not the man Johnny wants her to watch. Elaine starts to walk away,but the younger player misses a shot, and Billy comes to the table. She has a hard time believing her eyes. The older man looks familiar. She sits there thinking, Can this really be him? She goes as far as telling her son the television needs to be dusted., and she gets her rag and cleans off the T. V. She takes her time and gets a good look at the man. He's twenty-four years older than the last time she had seen him, but after one long last stare at him, Elaine knows that she knows this man. She refrains from blurting out the fact to her son. As she sits down, Johnny focuses on the pool match. She slips into the past and begins to recall the details of the first time they met. She falls into a trance as she starts to remember the vivid details of their brief affair in northern California.
That's all I can give you. The story takes off from here. I can tell you it's the first story to include both male and female players.
