He Published 2 Novels and Still Couldn't Graduate
He needed three more college credits in...well, you guessed it.
New York Times bestselling author Michael Koryta got the call from the records office at Indiana University shortly before he was scheduled to graduate. Looking back, it’s easy to understand why he overlooked a single core prerequisite.
Koryta was busy writing part-time for the Bloomington Herald-Times, he worked occasionally for a private detective and in what little spare time he had left, he was writing novels. He did all of this while studying for a degree in criminal justice because he never lost sight of his goal to become a crime fiction writer.
Koryta was a college sophomore when he sold his first novel. While shopping his first manuscript, the 19-year-old didn’t tell anyone he was a student for fear they wouldn’t take him seriously. Tonight I said Goodbye, was published the next year. He’d just turned 20, too young to walk up to the bar or rent a car, but old enough to be nominated for an Edgar Award that year from the Mystery Writers of America.
Koryta
His second novel, Sorrow’s Anthem, was published before he was scheduled to graduate. With so much on his plate, it’s easy to forgive him for overlooking that one required course in his curriculum. He was told he could not walk across the stage and pick up his diploma in May 2006.
“They informed me I hadn’t completed my intensive writing requirement.” That’s right. Indiana University was insisting he complete a writing course (he chose creative writing—go figure), before he could graduate. At the time, his creative writing was already published in ten languages around the world. So, he spent the summer of 2006 taking a correspondence course to graduate while still writing for the newspaper and working on his third novel.
Indiana University, after all, has its standards.
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Rick Pullen is the author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice.
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