For the next year and a half, I failed to land another book project, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Amidst the magazine writing and the part-time gig, three other well-developed ideas failed to launch. I was working through one of them with my agent’s then-assistant, Farley Chase, growing increasingly frustrated – with the idea, not with Farley – when I swore, “Dude, you’re not going to like hearing this, but this isn’t the book I really want to write. I want to write one about the CNAC Hump fliers. I think about that story every day. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that it didn’t sell.”

Rather than telling me to get stuffed for wasting so much of his time, Farley asked me to send him the rejected proposal.

I hadn’t looked at it in 18 months, not quite being able to face the failure, but I attached it to an email and sent it east regardless.

Farley took it home and read it and called me the next day: “Two things. One, you’re right, it’s a great story. Two, your proposal doesn’t do it justice. Read it again and we’ll talk.”

I swallowed my ego and did as I was told and lo! Farley was right. The first China’s Wings proposal hadn’t sold because it wasn’t any good.

Sure, I’d included great anecdotes, but as the next six years of research and writing would teach me, there’s no end of phenomenal anecdotes about the China National Aviation Corporation. I just hadn’t given the proposal any structure. I’d tossed good meat in front of my potential editors, but I hadn’t given them any skeleton from which to hang it. Without that skeleton, they couldn’t envision a finished book, and if a book proposal has one single overriding mission, it’s to make an editor clearly see the finished book.

In that, I’d definitely failed.

With Farley’s guidance, I invested another six weeks in revising the China’s Wings proposal yet again. However, much as I loved the story, I was also full of dread. I really was clinging to the end of the rope. As a writer, another rejection would drop me into free fall.

I fedexed the finished proposal on a Wednesday, scheduled to hit editors’ desks on Friday. (Which is neat to ponder from my current perspective, considering what I now know about the strong CNAC/Fedex connection — I doubt many Fedex employees know about it, and it’s a fascinating aspect of their company’s heritage.) Editors do their reading over weekends. Monday was silent, and I suffered. Tuesday was not. My agent, Ronald Goldfarb, fielded offers from several publishing houses. Wednesday afternoon, Bantam Dell bought it for a handsome fee.

I’d stepped out of my apartment to take Ronald’s call and heard the news on the white concrete around the complex’s pool.  I staggered upstairs, collapsed on my bed, pulled a blanket over my head, and sobbed tears of relief.

I flew to New York to ink the contract and meet my “acquiring editor”, John Flicker.

I came home from the reunion, thrilled to have bumbled into such an incredible story, invested three months researching and writing a book proposal about the madcap adventures of the China National Aviation Corporation, and had my agent submit it to a variety of publishers. To me, the story seemed incredible. I knew it was going to make a great book. I knew it was going to sell. I expected publishers to fall all over themselves in a frenzy to buy it, allowing me to focus my energies on writing the sort of book I’d always dreamed about authoring.

Instead, we heard nothing. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and still, we heard nothing. Hope leaked out of me as overwhelming, deafening, depressing silence came back from New York. The proposal failed. It didn’t sell.

I was astonished — and crushed. The three months of unpaid work I’d invested in writing an “on-spec” proposal pushed me over the freelance cliff. To make ends meet, I took a part time job. I still did as much magazine writing as I could sell, but even with that and the part time gig, it took me eighteen months to recover from the failure of the China’s Wings proposal. I’d had a divorce a year and a half before, I’d suffered an agonizing heartbreak since (they weren’t related events), I had a custody arrangement that didn’t allow me near enough time with my son, I was living in a grungy ground floor apartment, I wasn’t surfing or climbing, and I felt like I was failing as a writer.  It was the lowest I’d ever been.

On the last morning of the reunion, the hospitality room again filled with CNAC people and their wives. I sat to the side and watched them socialize, the conservative shirts, Sunday dresses, crinkled smiles, and thick glasses. Moon Chin leaned on a silver-topped cane. It was Pete Goutiere’s 88th birthday. Eighty-three year old Bill Maher, the CNAC Association’s president, stood and called the room to order with his vigorous parade ground bellow. Time presses down hard on these men, they don’t have much to waste, and Maher opened the meeting with a nano-moment of silence for the 9/11 victims, then began rehashing the minutes of last year’s meeting. “Since these minutes were written,” Maher boomed, “two of the four people under consideration to serve as association officers have passed away…” He swore. “How’n the hell did we ever get this old?”

Then he turned on me and lashed out, “Where were you ten years ago, Mr. Writer, when I had twice as many members?”

That was in 2002, and sadly, the last eight years haven’t been any easier on the Association’s ranks. I wouldn’t have been writer enough to handle such a rich and complex story if I’d stumbled upon it in 1992, however. I was still in the Army, dreaming about climbing, and I hadn’t written a word outside of a journal. This is Thanksgiving, and honestly, I’m thankful I discovered it when I did. Nor do I think I’d have been able to write a book about CNAC if I’d just stumbled across the story today. There wouldn’t be enough time. I’m lucky I found it when I did.

Waiting.

I’ve been doing a lot of it these last five or six months, and it’s making me a little crazy.

I’m waiting to hear back from my editor at Bantam Dell, an event which will hopefully get us into some serious line editing as we push my next book toward publication — the one I’ve been working on for six years. She told me this morning that she’s taking the manuscript to the Pennsylvania backwoods this Thanksgiving week and hopes to get the first set of pages to me after the holiday. Dear God, I hope so.

In the meantime, I thought I’d do some writing about the project itself.

Today is also my son’s tenth birthday and the 75th anniversary of the departure from Alameda Island of Pan Am’s first commercial transpacific flight — a very important event in my upcoming book, the one I’m waiting to hear back from Tracy about.