HE WROTE: The Rule of Seven

There's a show on TV called Seconds From Disaster. And it's probably a really, really bad time to use this as an analogy since we're going to be flying a lot this month on book tour but I was thinking about this as I was outside blowing off the driveway. For a plane to crash you usually need seven things to go wrong. Not one or two. But seven things. And the show will chronicle these seven things. A maintenance mistake. Sitting on the runway too long. A pilot error. Something breaking. Bad weather. An error in the tower. An instrument reading wrong. Etc. etc. It all adds up.

Well, I turn that around and I call it the Rule of Seven for success. To be successful you need at least seven thing to go right. We get asked often how we met and when we decided to collaborate. How it came to be. But if I had to really focus on specific events, it fit under the rule of seven. Let me give you at least one specific example working backwards on this train wreck of a collaboration (to get away from the flying thing cause we are both taking a flight on Monday heading for LaGuardia-- btw I grew up underneath the flight path into LaGuardia).

7. We meet in Maui on the same shuttle bus.
6. We both agree to teach at Maui. It was Jenny's first year. She agreed because her daughter Mollie wanted to see Maui and Shannon Tullius who co-runs the conference and retreat had read Jennie's books and, naturally, loved them. Mollie got off the plane, took a look around, and said, "Maui. Blah." I'd been teaching at Maui for six previous years because:
5. Six years previously, the Maui Writers Conference in a marketing ploy with Writer's Digest made an agreement to have seven or eight Writer's Digest Correspondence Course teachers come and teach at their retreat. For some strange reason I was the only one invited back the next year. Hmm.
4. I taught for Writers Digest because I was nobly giving back to the writing community. Actually, I needed the money.
3. I was able to teach for Writer's Digest because I'd been published.
2. I was published because I got an agent.
1. I got an agent because I broke the rules and submitted to every publisher on the face of the planet including a non-fiction publisher where a very nice editor called me up and said, "I really like what you sent me but we don't fiction but I know an agent would you like his name?"

Whew.

Except in publishing, it's not Seconds From Success.
It's Years From Success. From 1 to 7 took only 15 years. And from 7 to the book coming out took 20 months.