The Worst Day of Your Life by Edward Packard

“Ray and his agent were really the ones who set it up. “Bantam decided that half of the books would be written or subcontracted through me and half of the books through Ray Montgomery,” Packard told me in a phone interview, almost thirty years after the deal finally went down. But unbeknownst to Packard, Montgomery and his newly acquired agent were working on a deal of their own with a much bigger company- Bantam Books. Packard, frustrated with the lack of marketing muscle behind the releases, shopped around his concept and some new manuscripts and was eventually able to secure himself a deal with the J.B. Encouraged by the article, Packard contacted Montgomery and ultimately struck a deal with him, and in 1976 Sugarcane Island finally saw print, as the first in what was intended as a series of books entitled “The Adventures of You.” Montgomery followed up Packard’s book with a manuscript of his own, “Journey Under the Sea.”īarbara Carter illustration from the Lippincott edition of “Deadwood City” Several years later Packard saw an article about a start-up publisher named Vermont Crossroads Press, co-owned by one Ray (R.A.) Montgomery. “They all turned it down- they didn’t see the potential.” So he shelved the book, the whole concept.

Packard wrote the manuscript for his first book in the format, Sugarcane Island, in 19, and had an agent shop it around for years. It would have a similar effect on his audience.īut his ultimate audience was not as immediately accessible as his biological children. But when the concept first hit Edward Packard, it was like a bolt of lightning. With the power of hindsight we can find some precedents to the Choose Your Own Adventure, forked-path fiction format.

And so the father asks the children, “What do you think Pete should do?”

And all Edward Packard has is Pete, washed ashore on a deserted island. In this story it is 1969 and he is the father, and the children are his children, eager for a gripping bedtime narrative. He’s told the story many times over the past forty years, and so the words come quickly and easily, spilling out over the gulf between the two of us. – Edward Packard, Return to the Cave of Time, 1985 The oracle is silent for a moment, but then answers in a firm voice, “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” Conception/ Sugarcane Island/ The Cave of Time

The Worst Day of Your Life by Edward Packard