Some say write what you know. Some say, follow your passion. Some say find your natural readers.

Others say follow the market, write what the reader wants to read, position yourself just back of the leading edge of the latest trend.

I only followed the latter advice once, and did it without selling out. At a point in the late eighties, when my science fiction and fantasy work was hitting a brick wall for sales, I decided to write a contemporary adventure story.

I had always wanted to write my own equivalent of Travis McGee. Who wouldn’t? Neither detective nor spy, he went his own unique way and provided adventure for a generation of readers.

McGee was too much of con man for me, and he wasn’t enough of a loner. His buddy Meyer accompanied him in every other story. My guy, Ian Gunn, would be younger, better educated, but very much at odds with the world his education had prepared him for.

Here is the pitch:

Ian Gunn has a lot on his mind. He is facing a storm in mid-Atlantic, enroute to deliver a sailboat, a replica of Joshua Slocum’s Spray, to Marseille. He has just rescued Raven Cabral after someone tossed her off a cruise ship, and she hasn’t told him why that happened. Ian knows that if you rescue a mermaid, you are supposed to fall for her. No problem there, but her response is not quite so encouraging.

Raven’s attackers continue to pursue her after she arrives in Europe. Ian attempts to protect her until she leaves him in Paris, then finds himself tracking her across western Europe, trying to get to her before her attackers do.

What he discovers leads him back to California where he tracks down the man behind the attacks and wins immunity for Raven. Ian then returns to Europe to continue his search, needing to find her before rogue members of his enemy’s organization do. The search ends with a fire fight in a Norwegian fjord where . . .

I think I had better stop there, to avoid having to issue a spoiler alert.

When it was finished, I sent Raven’s Run to my agent. He was full of praise, especially for the exciting opening chapter. Then he said, “. . . but I’m afraid I can’t sell it. The bottom has completely fallen out of the men’s adventure market, and nobody is buying.”

So much for following the market.

I recently updated Raven’s Run a bit and sent it out to seek a home. What was once a contemporary adventure is now a historic one, and the new sales pitch begins:

It was April, 1989. Ayatollah Kohmeni had a few months left to live, and no one had yet heard of Osama ben Ladin. There were still two Germanies, two Berlins, and a wall; I had had my dealings with that wall a few years earlier, in uniform, when the cold war was even colder than today . . .

When it sells, I’ll tell you here. I don’t give up easily.