James Grippando :: Harper Collins Publishers

As a lawyer who worked fifty hour weeks at a large firm, my writing came in my free time, usually nights and weekends. I spent four years working on a manuscript that was good enough catch the eye of Artie Pine, a top literary agent and eternal optimist. Unfortunately, not even he could sell it to a publisher. The book was never published.

Artie the optimist encouraged me to try again, assuring me that I had gotten "the most encouraging rejection letters" he had ever seen. He had a way of putting the positive spin on even the most glum news, but after four years I wasn't sure I had another book in me. I told him I'd try. Again, I labored from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., trying to come up with a new idea. Nothing was coming.

Then, late one night in October 1992, tired of staring at a blank computer screen, I went for a walk before turning in. I got about three blocks from my house when, seemingly out of nowhere, a police car pulled up onto the grassy part of the curb in front of me. A cop jumped out and demanded to know where I was going. I told him that I was just out for a walk, that I lived in the neighborhood. He didn't seem to believe me. "There's been a report of a peeping tom," he said. "I need to check this out." I stood helplessly beside the squad car and listened as the officer called in on his radio for a description of the prowler. "Under six feet tall," I heard the dispatcher say, "early to mid-thirties, brown hair, brown eyes, wearing blue shorts and a white t shirt." I panicked inside. I was completely innocent, but it was exactly me! "And a mustache," the dispatcher finally added. I sighed with relief. I had no mustache. The cop let me go. But as I walked home, I could only think of how close I'd come to disaster. Even though I was innocent, my arrest would have been a media event, and forever I would have been labeled as "the peeping tom lawyer."

It was almost 2 a.m. by the time I returned home, but I decided that I needed to write about this. A peeping tom lawyer wasn't exactly bestseller material, so I took this feeling of being wrongly accused to the most dramatic extreme I could think of. I wrote about a man hours away from execution for a crime he may not have committed. What I wrote that night became the opening scene of The Pardon. I finished the manuscript in seven months, and it sold to HarperCollins in two weeks. It's now available all over the world in fourteen languages.

I guess Artie the optimist was right. When a door closes, a window opens.