Perseverance pays off for Waukesha author

Local author Kathie Giorgio is no stranger to the professional literary world.

An internationally known short story writer, she has published works in more than 30 anthologies over 35 years. She also founded and currently directs AllWriters' Workplace and Workshop, a creative writing studio in Waukesha.

With these accomplishments and more padding her resume, it seems odd that Giorgio had to wait almost three years to see her first full-length novel published.

"There's been so many changes in New York in the last 10 years between the economy and just New York itself," said Giorgio. "New York used to be unafraid of everything. They would publish things that were controversial; they would publish things that were dark. And now it seems like there's more of a focus on the upbeat and on keeping things light. It's gotten harder and harder even for established authors to get things published through New York."

Giorgio's novel, "The Home for Wayward Clocks," tells the story of James Elgin and his vast and unique collection of timepieces. As the story unfolds on this eccentric man and his home-turned-clock museum in What Cheer, Iowa, the reader learns the reason behind Elgin's hobby.

This not-so-cheery revelation posed marketing problems for Giorgio with more than just the New York publishers, but "Clocks" was not a story she was willing to let go of so easily.

"I was agented when I was writing it, and when the agent saw it afterward, she said, 'Well, I don't like to represent dark stuff.' So my choice was to either get rid of the agent and keep pushing the book or get rid of the book and hang on to the agent, and so I fired the agent," she said. "I got a new agent, and she tried to sell the book for a year and wasn't able to, so she wanted me to shelve the book. This book I just wasn't willing to give up on, so I fired her as well and then I started marketing it to the independent publishers."

After sending out a number of queries, Giorgio's novel finally caught the interest of Main Street Rag Publishing Company, an independent publisher based in North Carolina, through the publication of another of her short stories.

"The thing with Main Street Rag is you can't submit to them, you have to be invited to submit to them," explained Giorgio. "When they accepted my story I mentioned to them that it just happened to be in the second chapter of my book, and then they asked to see the book and from there, there it went."

"The Home for Wayward Clocks" took six years to evolve from idea to published work. Despite such a long and elaborate journey, the story's origin – like so many good ideas – was a spontaneous one.

"It wasn't a book that I planned on writing. I was actually about 100 pages into another project at the time that this one started," said Giorgio. "I collect clocks myself, and I was on my way home from visiting one of my favorite clock shops and I was thinking, 'It would be so cool to live inside a clock shop.' The original opening lines to the book, which were 'They call me the clock keeper; I'm the keeper of the clocks,' came to me out of nowhere. So I just kept repeating those lines to myself until I got home and I wrote them down, and by the end of the afternoon I had the opening scene."

Giorgio originally planned to turn her idea into a short story collection, but James Elgin, as all good characters do, soon took on a life of his own.

"It was going to be stories about all these different kinds of clocks, and James was just going to be a figure who moved in between," she said. "But as I worked on it, his sections kept getting longer and longer and it became obvious that he had a storyline too, so I had to let those outfitting sections grow.

"The odd-numbered chapters are all his story, and the even-numbered chapters are complete stand-alone short stories about the clocks before they came into James's possession. There's a totally different feeling in the even-numbered chapters. You could read those stories and you'd be done, because they're complete from beginning to end."

The literary world may consider its ever-changing story development foreshadowing for the publishing twists "Clocks" would later encounter, but be it literary device or good old-fashioned roll-with-the-punches versatility, Giorgio emphasizes that keeping an open-ended goal is key to all sides of the writing business.

"Sometimes your head is going to make a left turn where you figured you were going to be turning right, and you end up with something just so much better than what you ever even thought of," she said. "That's just all part of the creative process."