When I decided to alter my life's course from that of a scrubbed and well-shaven Washington lobbyist in a three-piece suit and wingtips to that of a raffish, ponytailed author immured on a mountainside in western North Carolina, it was my intention to write historical fiction. And for the first few years that’s what I did. Then I encountered a riveting true-life tale out of nineteenth-century Colorado that I first tried and failed to capture in a novel before deciding that it might require treatment as straight history. Although I had published some nonfiction magazine articles, I had never attempted a book-length history, and as a profoundly nonacademic person, I doubted I had the discipline, or the credentials, to write one.
Yet when the time came to submit the manuscript, I offered it to the University Press of Colorado. Looking back on that impetuous act, I find I can’t account for it. I had always regarded academic presses as cold and authoritarian refuges for the dry works of bespectacled professors. I suppose I hopefully thought my story just might find a home there since it dealt with an aspect of Colorado’s pioneer history. But it was an account of a manhunt for serial killers, so I also feared it might strike UPC's austere readers as sensational, lurid, and unseemly.
Imagine my surprise when, instead of curtly refusing my proffer, UPC responded with enthusiasm. Not only that, but the dreaded peer reviewers to whom my manuscript was sent—lofty personages from academia—were largely positive in their responses as well. The relationship between writers and regional fiction publishers is often thought of as familial, and in my experience that had been true—with the caveat that the family concerned was often a dysfunctional one. Sensitivities abounded; parental rule governed; and authorial suggestions and requests were treated as impermissible trespasses by wayward children.
But when the time came for me to work in detail with UPC’s staff, not one of these vexing problems surfaced. After eighteen years of working with supersensitive fiction publishers, I was agreeably surprised to learn that the staff members of an academic house could be not only rigorous in their expectations but also warm, welcoming, friendly, and—believe it or not—respectful of one’s efforts. I was no longer regarded as a troublesome and demanding author of surly disposition but as part of a team, if not a family, all of whose members were united in a common effort. For that I will always be grateful.
Novelist-turned-historian Charles F. Price is a full-time writer living in North Carolina and has previously published five novels. Season of Terror is his first nonfiction book.
