"All the writers I know have stories like mine, of trying to get into print and going through all the rejections," says 1981 Rice graduate Elizabeth Crook, whose first novel was published by Doubleday in 1991, more than five years after she began looking for a publisher.
"We call these war stories the 'horribler' stories, meaning 'My story is horribler than your story.' Everyone thinks he or she has the 'horriblest' story of all, but they don't. Because I do."
These days, she uses this tale to promote The Raven's Bride, a historical romance based on the life of Mrs. Sam Houston. Deceivingly diminutive behind the podium with her long blond ponytail and slight frame, Crook is speaking to a group of Dallas high school students at a fund raiser for a group that works to prevent drop-outs.
"I wanted to write about a woman in history that had been misrepresented or overlooked," she says. "Eliza Allen was perfect, because she's such an enigma. And she really had never been portrayed, I thought, with any sensitivity."
 The daughter of a prominent landowner, 20-year-old Eliza Allen married 36-year-old Sam Houston in 1829. Their split a scant 11 weeks later forced Houston to resign in disgrace as governor of Tennessee, knocking him off the conventional path to power and bringing him west, where he became president of the Republic of Texas.
Eliza Allen, Crook notes, "changed history, and was forgotten."
The couple never offered a public reason for their separation. Houston was to insinuate throughout his life that he felt Eliza never loved him, but Crook says "there was nothing specific." Eliza nurtured the secret to her death, leaving historians with no memoirs, no photographs, even an unmarked grave.
Crook found that most historians had portrayed the woman as a spoiled, vapid child-bride. Although there exists no evidence to support that claim, Crook didn't want her book to be about blame. Instead, she focuses on the two people and their relationship. The result is a complicated love story that stops short of the Harlequin Romance genre.
"In a sense, what I did was give her back some sense of integrity," Crook says.
On the first go-round, she did it in too many pages. Still, her New York agent gallantly tried to sell the 750-page manuscript.
"I know just how gallantly he tried," she says, "because he sent me all the rejection letters."
Crook concedes that some writers are flattered when editors take time to give specific reasons for a rejection. She was not, especially when editors couldn't agree on which characters worked.
"Of course, when an editor liked the characters," she says "he or she felt compelled to give other reasons for rejecting the book -- often painful reasons, like 'Aaron, I didn't like this manuscript. Why did you send it to me?'"
Her agent finally wrote, "I do feel we have run out of places to send your book in New York."
So Crook got a new agent, who found her shorter, revised manuscript a home in Texas Monthly Press, where it was scheduled for publication in 1988. Then Texas Monthly Press was sold to a company that doesn't publish fiction.
Crook retrieved her manuscript and kept trying. Within a month, she received an offer from Doubleday.
"The Raven's Bride had been to Doubleday three times before, in three different drafts under three different titles and two different agents," she says.
This time, the manuscript had a little help. Family friend Bill Moyers showed the book to his editor at Doubleday, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who jumped at the chance to publish it.
"When she called," Crook remembers, "I was in the depths of depression, eating pork and beans out of the can."
That quote earned her an appearance on the quiz show, "To Tell the Truth," and caused some embarrassment when it appeared in The Washington Post. "I was far from destitute," she insists.
Even so, what inspires a first-time novelist to perverse through so many years of rejection?
"There were enough people whose opinions I trusted telling me that I could do it," she says.
"I remember when I was little, I decided I was going to be like Mary in Peter, Paul and Mary. I was going to play the guitar, and I was going to sing. I did it for about two years and nobody ever said I was good, so after a while it started to dawn on me that maybe I have no talent. With writing it was never that way."
Today, she lives in Austin, where she is working on her second novel, a fictional account of the Texas Revolution.
--Theresa Bujnoch
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