Dave Ayotte

It took me 34 years to finally get this story down, and another 4 years to proof read it.

On the way, a deadly fire, where I was living, destroyed the first attempt on Christmas Eve, 1989. When I went homeless in 2007, I lost my second attempt.

Then, in 2014, someone gave me a pound of trim, and the whole story finally came out in a rush of writing.

Four years later, it was ready to go, but because literary agents are lazy and sometimes stupid, my 200,000 plus word novel was rejected, because of the zero tolerance rule that neophytes, new writers, aren't allowed to write anything over 100,000 words.

Screw them, I thought, turned my one novel into three and decided to publish them on my own.

And now, here we sit, and you get to judge whether literary agents were right or wrong in their lazy decision to automatically reject my novel because of length.