Jeff Andrus

Something in Common is about two women, a wife and a mistress, who reluctantly get together to solve the murder of their beloved, inadvertently incurring the wrath of a Balkan thug involved in black market art.

It was written as a screenplay in collaboration with Jean McEvoy in the early Nineties. At that time it was called Restoration. In the middle of the decade we split a small option payment, but the script sat in Development Hell. When the rights reverted, I asked Jean to allow me to be the sole author of a novella based on our screenplay, and he readily agreed. Both of us hoped that a published work would lead back to a movie.

The trouble was, as another writer I respect pointed out to me, there is no market for short novels. I needed to expand mine so that a lot more trees would be cut down if it ever saw print. That work required filling in plot holes, dragging secondary characters to the foreground, inventing others and finding new twists in the story. 9/11 came, and I thought that should be integrated since most of the novel takes place in New York City. Somewhere in the process of writing and rewriting, characters got cell phones and the title of their story changed to Something in Common.

I spent the year of 2002 waiting for three agents to whom I had been recommended by what you might call a New York literary light. They successively took their sweet time rejecting the manuscript. In 2003 I said, “To Hell with this,” and posted installments of the novel on my website.

In November of 2006 I read the full manuscript again. I expected the story to seem dated, but it was as fresh as reading another writer’s work, and if I do say so myself, offered relevant insights into the world we're living in today.

Excerpts from the sef-help book The Courage To Be Brilliant by human potential expert Marta Monahan. I was initially hired as an editor, and Martha and her publisher graciously made me a co-author.