How a Former neo-Nazi Became my Esteemed Client

Breaking Hate

*Apologies: This was sent out this morning but only to 70 people for some reason. I emailed Substack for help. Hopefully this reaches everyone.

^^^

It was 2014. I was 31 years old. At the time I’d been sober a little less than four years. Several of my short stories had finally been published in various magazines, which had started occurring two years prior, when I was 29. At last, after more than a decade and seven different colleges—mostly various community colleges and San Francisco State twice—I’d procured my bachelor’s degree in creative writing. I was living in a tiny illegal shoebox apartment (a split-in-half former garage) on Alcatraz Ave in North Oakland for a now-unbelievably-low $750/month, all utilities included.

Recently, I’d finished interning for a literary agent in Tiburon for nine months. Without question I’d learned more than I could swallow about the practical side of book publishing: How to draft query letters; what to look for in a synopsis or book proposal; what agents liked and didn’t like, wanted and didn’t want from hungry new authors. I’d learned about contracts and negotiations, foreign and other subsidiary rights, and what word count was acceptable for a new book (not 100,000 words, excepting science fiction).

And I also learned the craft of developmental editing.

The agent I interned for had been an editor at a medium publishing house before becoming an agent. I shared some of my writing with her, including my first try at a novel, an autofiction based on my wild, lurid high school punk rock anarchy days, as well as the most structurally complicated novel I’ve to this day ever written—a novel about a sober man who gets out of prison and seeks his ex-girlfriend, knowing he shouldn’t, and gets into more trouble than he can handle. The novel includes four points of view. It required easily hundreds of hours of research, mostly about crime and prison, which I knew little about. (Surprisingly, given my sordid drinking past.) In short: Said agent encouraged my writing and also noted that I had a sharp eye for detail. This led to her asking for my editorial feedback on her acquired clients’ books.

The editing started out small but then grew. Soon I started to truly enjoy the process. Developmental editing—focusing on Big Picture issues of a manuscript such as structure, plot, characters, story-arc, dialogue, tension, etc—was very attractive to me. It wasn’t line or copy editing or proofreading, going ruthlessly over the language and the syntax and the grammar. That sounded boring to me. No, I got to open the hood of the car and really pull apart the engine. That was superb, in my book. (Pun intended.)

Eventually, in late 2013 I left the agency and started my editing business. At first it was made up of a website—www.michaelmohrwriter.com—which included a regular blog about my agency experience. That started to gain followers. I began to get requests for editing. I charged a very low rate at first. I was new, cutting my editorial teeth as it were. After not too long I began attending writers’ conferences—my first was the San Francisco Writers’ Conference. I learned more about the trade. I had editing cards made with my photo in black and white on the back. I got more work. I raised my rates. Some basic, classic mistakes were made; I learned from them.