BREAKING NEWS!!!!
Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot , has made an offer to publish Swimming in the Shadow of Death. This is the story of the loss of the US submarine Flier in the Philippines in World War II and the survival and escape from enemy territory of eight of its crew members, the only shipwrecked submariners to evade capture during that conflict.
Publication date is fall 2010, assuming everyone signs where they are supposed to.
Lyons Editor Keith Wallman was a fledgling editor at Carroll & Graf in 2001 when he was assigned to handle my first book, The Sea's Bitter Harvest. So it will be a reunion of sorts for us. I found working with Keith back then to be an enjoyable experience, as I'm sure it will be this time.
Keith was working on that book in Carroll & Graf's offices near the New York City financial district on September 11, 2001, and was walking down the street to work that morning when the first of the jets hit the World Trade Center. He later described the scene of thousands of others whom he joined to walk, stunned, back to Brooklyn (I think) across one of the East River bridges.
I had sent the Flier manuscript to another editor at Lyons almost exactly a year ago and heard little from him. About a month ago, I tried to find out what had happened. (Six months earlier, that editor told me he liked what he had read but had been side-tracked.) I learned that that editor was no longer with Lyons. But the person who responded to me said that Keith would like to look at the manuscript.
I'm eager to sign the contract and get working on presenting this great story to the public, 56 years later.
I'll keep you updated.