He was three years ahead of me, going to USC Film School. He read a review of my book in the Dartmouth alumni magazine and wrote asking if he could do a screenplay from it. I took him up on it, met his agent and through him, got started. Rick has really been my mentor. Novel writing was forgotten.
Novel writing is such a lonely pursuit.
Then, the book comes out and there's no support behind it. It disappears in a matter of months and you wonder why you worked so hard. If you can live off the ego trip of having a novel published and getting good reviews, I guess it's a good way to stay alive. I couldn't see that life for me, especially with the kind of novels I was writing, ones which didn't have a prayer of ever becoming bestsellers. It simply became an ego thing.