About 20 years ago, I wrote a novel.

It was the story I felt I wanted to tell, a story that explored the idea of honor and its consequences in the form of a coming-of-age story.

[caption id="attachment_790" align="alignright" width="225" caption="Rob Miller, aka Virgile Borderies"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Whiter-Shade-of-Pale.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-790" title="Whiter Shade of Pale" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Whiter-Shade-of-Pale-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

"A Whiter Shade of Pale" told the story of Rob Miller, his first year at the University of Virginia in 1967 and his interaction with the university's well-known Honor System.

I finished the book at a time when the publishing business was starting to fall apart, particularly in the area of fiction. I had several agents say it was the kind of novel they could have sold easily a few years before, but one for which there wasn't any market anymore.

A movie company thought enough of it that they worked with it for a year, but in the end it suffered the same fate 90 percent of all Hollywood projects do -- it fell apart.

I sent it out two or three times and got rejection notices. Then I sort of gave up.

I worked with it over the years, tightening and revising, updating it to reflect a man looking back 40 years after college instead of 20.