So last night I heard from my friend Jamie Roberts that he was going to be airing my story Cyrano De Nerderac on his show Radiogram on our local community radio station KZYX in a couple hours.
At the appointed hour I listened to the very funny story for the first time since I recorded the tale in 2007, nearly twenty years ago. I laughed and laughed and laughed and cried at the end. What a great story!
I made that recording to go with several other stories on an album entitled I Remember You that was one of my first collaborations with my wife Marcia Sloane. I read stories and she played cello interludes between the stories. We sent out hundreds of copies of the CD to Spoken Word shows on radio stations all over America and no one, except Jamie, ever played any of the stories. Oh well.
Twenty years is a long time ago. However, I wrote Cyrano De Nerderac almost fifty years ago and published it in either Seventeen magazine or Young Miss. My memory fails me in this regard and I no longer have a copy of whichever magazine my agent sold the story to. I do remember I was paid 500 dollars for the story, which fifty years ago was some nice coin, as we used to say.
Before I succeeded in publishing a novel, I sold short stories to Cosmopolitan, Gallery, Seventeen, and Young Miss through the efforts of my first and most excellent literary agent Dorothy Pittman who took me on as her client in 1973 after reading an early novel of mine entitled Suicide Notes From My Friends and a collection of short stories entitled What Shall the Monster Sing and other stories.
The first story she sold for me was entitled Willow about a female boxer. She sold the story to Cosmopolitan in 1975 for a thousand dollars, a dizzying sum for a hippy living in a garage in Eugene, Oregon. And over the next eight years she sold several more stories of mine to Cosmopolitan (for two thousand each!) as well as three or four stories to Seventeen, and a couple to Young Miss.
In 1977 she sold my novel Inside Moves to Doubleday and the subsequent paperback sale and movie sale launched my career as a successful writer, which career was essentially over a decade later for reasons I will not bore you with.
In any case, Cyrano De Nerderac got written, published, recorded, and you can listen to it gratis and maybe have a laugh or three.
Fin
What Comes Around piano solo by Todd from his album Incongroovity