Fame finally flows to longtime writer in genre of Harry Potter
By MELVIN BAKER
Published January 18, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - For decades, it didn't pay for Elenora Sabin to be an author.
The former teacher, who turned 68 last week, had written eight novels across the years and had published exactly none of them.
Then came a lucky break, the kind normally reserved for the characters in her youth fantasy stories: Harry Potter books showed editors that young people would read what she had been writing for years - long fantasy novels.
She got published. It was a manuscript that had been left unloved in her attic for years.
Now she has sold three novels and has been advanced $30,000. Royalties will come in soon, not bad for a woman who lived for a long time on the salary of a teacher in Pinellas Park.
Her second novel was published just last week - she had a signing at Haslam's Book Store on Saturday - and a third novel will come out next year.
The New York Public Library System named her first novel, A School for Sorcery, to its 2003 list of Best Books for the Teen Age, and it was rereleased in paperback.
Sabin began writing in the fourth grade. "I always had very vivid dreams and I started to write stories, mostly fairy tales based on my dreams," she said.
She was orphaned at 13 but kept writing. Her ninth-grade English teacher encouraged her. "She taught us things that I didn't learn in any other class, like all the figures of speech, like onomatopoeia, metaphor and simile, all of them," Sabin said. "She was a very good teacher, strict grammarian."
She continued writing through high school. "I tried sending some stuff and immediately got rejected, got discouraged, and decided that I really wanted to teach." After all, she knew grammar cold.
After graduating from Baylor University, Sabin taught Spanish and English at Disston Junior High School and then at Pinellas Park Junior High (now Pinellas Park Middle School). For the next 30 years Sabin continued to write, "but more as a hobby than anything else," she said.
In the summer of 1982, feeling burned out by teaching, she began writing in earnest. The following year she submitted a story for critique at a workshop conducted by the International Association on the Fantastic in the Arts in Fort Lauderdale. The instructor that year was noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.
Ellison told her that of those in the workshop, "maybe there were two that had possibilities, but the vast majority had no talent at all, and I was in that majority. And I thought, "I'm going to show him."'
She took to heart something else Ellison said during the workshop: "If you can do anything besides writing, don't write.' And I decided I couldn't do anything besides writing. That was really what I wanted to do."
Sabin, who never married, retired from teaching in 1987. By that time several of her short stories had been published in small press magazines. But no novels.
One of her short stories, entitled The Last Gift, was turned down by the Women's Science Fiction and Fantasy Anthology. The rejection letter contained a list of questions that the editor felt the story didn't answer. "I knew she was right," Sabin said. "But I said if I answer all those questions, I'll have a novel."
In 1992, Sabin submitted that story, now reworked and lengthened into a novel, A School for Sorcery, for consideration by the Gryphon Prize for best unpublished manuscript by a new fantasy writer.
Following the maxim to write what you know, Sabin wrote about school and students. The protagonist, a 16-year-old girl named Tria, is sent to a "school for the magically gifted." Tria must deal with a haughty shapeshifting roommate, battle a classmate who takes up with evil forces, and struggle to release two classmates from a world only she can enter.
A School for Sorcery won the prize, which was sponsored by science fiction and fantasy writer Andre Norton. It was worth $500 and a guarantee of readings by editors in major publishing houses. Three editors read it, and they all liked it.
But the story was in the "young adult" genre, and her manuscript, at 80,000 words, was considered too long.
Sabin submitted A School for Sorcery to other editors, and even got a literary agent. But, "finally, I just stuck it up in my attic and went on working on other things." Years went by. Sabin worked on other novels, and on keeping her spirits up.
She continued to go to writers' conventions. She got feedback on works in progress at local writers' groups. She interacted with other fantasy writers via bulletin boards on the Web.
She was driven by "pure stubbornness and the fact that I had all these ideas that wouldn't leave me alone and I had to write. If you're really driven to write, you can't not write. And that was the way I felt about it. I just had confidence that one day something would break, and it did."
That break took the form of a 13-year-old boy with a magic wand, and he waved it in Sabin's direction. That boy was Harry Potter.
Suddenly, publishers wanted more young adult books. And the length of the Harry Potter books showed editors that teens would read longer stories.
Sabin pulled A School for Sorcery down from the attic and sent it to Andre Norton's agent.
When the agent called to tell her that publishing house Tor had offered a contract, "Well, you probably could have heard me all over the neighborhood. I went ahhhhh!" She demonstrates with a scream. "I went dashing around. It was a wonderful feeling."
She was 65 years old, and her dream had come true. Since then, it has come true again and again. After A School for Sorcery was published in 2002, it was released last year in paperback. A prequel, A Perilous Power, was released last week. The third book in the series, When the Beast Ravens, is due in 2005. A fourth book is with her agent.
Sabin knows that comparisons of her books to Harry Potter's J.K. Rowling are inevitable. "It doesn't bother me because I explain to people that I wrote them well before (Rowling). But I do have people say, "Oh, it's just a Harry Potter wannabe,' and I just ignore it."
Working with teachers in Pinellas County schools, she has developed a teaching kit with "enrichment activities" for students who have read A School for Sorcery. A copy of that book and a teaching kit have been placed in every middle and high school library in the county.
The retired teacher has learned a few things herself. "It's never too late. I'm launching a new career in my 60s and it's keeping me young and I'm loving it."
