Meeting Clive Cussler

I was incensed when my oil company went belly up at the end of the last oil boom. I had never before faced total failure and I felt emasculated, both mentally and physically. Anne and I had an IBM AT, the state-of-the-art personal computer at the time, and an early word processing program called Framework. Unable to save my ailing oil company, I began writing an expose instead to tell the world what we had endured.

Within ninety days I completed a novel of a hundred and twenty thousand words. The book, a total disaster, still resides in my trunk. I’ve read it since and it is still horrible, but it taught me one thing - I truly love to write, even if I never make a penny doing it.

Realizing my shortcomings, I began reading every writer’s magazine I could buy, and every how-to book of writing that I could find, or check out from the library. One day in the Daily Oklahoman I saw an announcement for the annual Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Inc. (OWFI) meeting. Anne and I barely had money for groceries at the time, but she somehow scraped together the money for me to attend.

The first meeting that I attended was at the Lincoln Plaza, defunct for perhaps the last ten years. It was going strong at the time and there were probably two hundred writers in attendance, including Clive Cussler the keynote speaker.

After registering on Saturday, I went to the main hall, like everyone else, to hear the President of the OWFI launch the conference. I found an empty chair at a large table. I was the only man at the table and I got my first lesson in Writing 101, learning that most of the authors in the world are females. The women at my table were all romance writers and they all knew each other. It’s a true but little known fact that there are more romance writers per capita in Oklahoma than any other state in the Union – I’m not making this up!

The ladies at my table were all wonderful. When they asked me what I had written, I had to tell them, “Not much.” It didn’t matter because they had all been there. Everyone has to start somewhere and they were all supportive.

The chair beside me was vacant, perhaps the only vacant seat in the entire large room. As I was talking to the women at my table, someone took the seat beside me, banging into my chair as they did. I turned to see a slender man in a white shirt and blue jeans. He was a good looking man with a trimmed beard and I could instantly see the attraction in the eight sets of female romance writer’s eyes when he spoke.

“Hi, ladies, hope I’m not disturbing anything.”

“Not at all,” the woman next to me said, almost poking out my eye as she reached across me to shake his hand. “I’m Glenda so-and-so,” she said.

“Glad to meet you,” the man answered. “I’m Clive Cussler.”

Every woman at the table practically swooned. I never got a chance to speak but I’m sure that I was Cussler’s biggest fan at the table. Having grown up with Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, I had just finished reading Cussler’s wonderful adventure novel Cyclops and I thought that he was the second coming.

Later, when I listened to Cussler’s keynote address, I learned that nothing comes easy in the writing world. He was in his forties before he ever had a book published, and then only after tricking an agent into representing him. When he finally told his agent of many years what he had done, the man was so angry that he walked out of the expensive New York restaurant in a huff.

Cussler was rich and famous when I met him, but you wouldn’t have known it by talking to him. He was humble, courteous and as down-to-earth as any long-haul truck driver. Yes, he was a real gentleman and hey, the romance writers at my table liked him too!

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