Title: Hunting the King
Author: Peter Clenott
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Kunati, Inc.
ISBN: 978-1601641489
1. First off, congratulations on the big novel sale! Give us the elevator pitch. What’s your book about?HUNTING THE KING follows archaeologist Molly O’Dwyer into war torn Iraq in search of the remains of Jesus and his illegitimate daughter Hannaniah. Molly witnessed her mother’s death in a fire when she was five years old. She never knew her father. After her mother’s death, she was raised on the campus of a Jesuit college in Boston. Now an archaeologist she has been recruited to participate in a perilous dig in the midst of a war zone. Her mother had been a counter culture radical, the youngest tenured professor at her school. Molly has inherited her mother’s genes. She is compelled to know what lies buried under the sands of ancient Babylon. But she is also a loyal observant Catholic afraid that who or what she uncovers will have dire consequences for her faith.
ForeWord Magazine said, ‘Given such an auspicious start, the sequel can’t come too soon.’
2. Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication. What’s yours? Did you use an agent? Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.
My journey began 35 years ago. I had no clue I wanted to write. I sleep-walked through four years of college and began writing a science fiction novel called THE THIRD WORLD in May of 1973. I would sit on the stoop of my Beacon Hill apartment using an old portable typewriter and drive everyone crazing pecking away first thing in the morning.
Over the years the novels and screenplays piled up, as well as the rejection slips. I got my first agent in the late 70s after I had spent time in South Africa. Turns out, she is reputed to be one of the worst agents in the country. Of course, she might have deteriorated over time and only been reasonably bad when I had her.
After novels on chimpanzees, revolution in Africa, and a fictional biography, I turned in frustration to screenwriting. I got an LA agent. She retired after two weeks. Then I returned to novels to write the can’t-miss story of Hannaniah, the illegitimate daughter of Jesus ( and the idea that ultimately sparked HUNTING). I got an agent in West Virginia. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Did he really agree to take on an agent from West Virginia? You bet I did. And I was excited, to boot. Not that there’s anything wrong with West Virginia, mind you. But when I discovered she was rewriting my novel and not telling me, that relationship ended.
I continued to write. Now raising a family with three kids and working two jobs, I managed to crank out the first of the Molly O’Dwyer books, something called TRACES OF A LIFE. Through a local editor, I managed to secure my first New York agent. Now I knew my day was coming.
But not quite yet. This was now the 21st century and the publishing industry had changed. The agent loved TRACES but couldn’t sell it. As I was in the middle of writing HUNTING THE KING she decided she only wanted to represent non-fiction. So there I was once again bereft of representation. More letters went out. More rejections came back. I finished HUNTING and wrote THEY WERE CALLED TO DUTY, a novel focusing on the last survivors of WWI. Then in desperation I found this site on the web called FirstWriters. Through them I located a Canadian publisher called Kunati Books. They were new, founded only that year, but they were looking for cutting edge novels, (think Hollywood) and were gladly taking manuscripts from unpublished pond scum like myself. In late March ‘07 I sent them a log line and a synopsis. In early April they asked me to send the full manuscript and to expect a three month wait.
Three months passed. On Monday August 5 of 2007, I got an email from the publisher saying two staff had read the novel and liked it. He was going to take the next shot at it. My hopes were raised, not for the first time in 34 years. Then on Thursday while I was at work, I got another email from the publisher. You can imagine how I felt. I wanted desperately to open it hoping that this was the news I had been waiting for for over three decades. On the other hand, I had raised my hopes so high I was afraid to have them crushed yet again. I went to the bathroom, I cleaned my desk, I returned phone calls. I delayed as much as I could until I finally just had to open the damned message.
The publisher wanted me to call him. He was offering a contract.
Let that suffice. I think you can appreciate what I felt at that moment.
3. Do you have another book in the pipeline? What are you working on now?
Something completely different. It’s called ALBERTVILLE. The story focuses on a young black woman named Alma Jesse Westcott, who grows up in Alabama in the 1940s and ‘50s. Something traumatic happens to her on the road to Albertville, Alabama. She grows up, goes on to college in Boston, is bilingual in French and envisions herself a novelist living in Paris, leading the literary life. She is Republican and takes a conservative approach to the civil rights leaders in the US. But when a former lover recruits her to join the State Department, she goes to the Congo in 1960 when that nation just gained its independence from Belgium. Her assignment is to get in with the new prime minister Patrice Lumumba, an impulsive man who will not bow down before anyone. It is the height of the Cold War, and against her better judgment, Jesse bonds with Lumumba, wants him to succeed while her handlers at State and the CIA want him dead. The novel bookends in the city of Albertville in the Congo. ALBERTVILLE is Jesse’s coming of age story set against the backdrop of two wars. One being fought in the deep south of the US, the other being fought overseas. I hope to God this is Oprah material.
4. What’s your writing process like? Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?
Before I had a family, I set a time line for novel completion and tried to write a certain number of pages a day. When I wrote depended upon my life schedule. I could write at night during the week days and in the morning or afternoon on weekends. I found I was probably most creative in the early morning. Now that I have a family and work seven days a week, I have to write on my lunch break, when my boss isn’t looking (like right now), and during my overnight weekend job. It isn’t easy, but it gets done.
5. There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at the The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership. Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her. If not, tell us what you have against cats.
I grew up with two cats. We had a mother named Heidi who had a litter of four in our kitchen. We kept two of them, Lucky and Heidi the second. Now I live with three cats: Harry, the all black male cat who will not get off my lap. Audrey who likes to chase and fetch. And Ellie, the smallest but the one who controls the household. Molly O’Dwyer, by the way, also owns a cat. (Who is a clue in the first novel TRACES).
