In my WSJ profile of the writer Stephen Coonts yesterday (no free link), I wrote:
Five years ago, on 9/11, Coonts was working on a book that imagined the secession of California. “I scrapped it,” he says. “I figured that nobody wanted to read about America breaking apart.”
Veteran crime novelist Robert Ferrigno (who is also an NRO reader) made a different decision when he wrote Prayers for the Assassin, a crime novel set in the near future Islamic States of America. Here’s what Robert says on his blog:
Prayers, originally dubbed “career suicide” by my long-time agent and rejected by my long-time publisher, went on to become a New York Times and LA Times best-seller, and the most sucessful book I’ve ever written.
And here’s my NRO article on his book.