Author
From a rejected manuscript to twenty-five years of Wonderland.
Frank Beddor didn’t set out to become an author.
By 1998, he had spent years in Hollywood developing and producing other people’s stories. That summer, There’s Something About Mary, which he produced, became one of the biggest comedies of the year. But Frank had increasingly found himself wanting to move from producing stories to creating one of his own.
The way in came from an unexpected place.
A Deck Of Cards
In 1998, while in London for the premiere of There’s Something About Mary, Frank had an afternoon to himself and went to the British Museum. There he encountered a partial deck of playing cards depicting strange, unfamiliar versions of characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The images brought back questions that had fascinated him since childhood. What if there was more to Wonderland than Lewis Carroll had written? What if the nonsense actually made sense? What if Wonderland wasn’t a dream at all?
A chance encounter with an Oxford collector who possessed the rest of the deck pushed those questions further.
Frank began writing.
Five Years. And Every Major Publisher In America Said No.
It took five years to complete The Looking Glass Wars.
Frank had transformed the Wonderland of his childhood into something entirely different: a real civilization with its own history, politics, technology and wars. Alice became Alyss Heart, a princess forced to flee her world after her aunt Redd murders her parents and seizes the throne. Stranded in Victorian England, Alyss tells her story to Lewis Carroll—who gets almost everything wrong.
Frank believed in the book.
American publishing did not.
Every major publisher in the United States turned it down.
“It was painful.”
But the story wasn’t finished with him.
Egmont published The Looking Glass Wars in Britain in 2004. A Yankee author reinventing one of England’s most treasured literary creations proved impossible to ignore. Some embraced it. Some were outraged.
Readers found it.
The book became a sensation. The Looking Glass Wars and its sequel, Seeing Redd, went on to spend a combined thirty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Book Became A World
What followed wasn’t simply a series of sequels.
Frank kept discovering more of Wonderland.
The original trilogy expanded into the Hatter M graphic novels, following Hatter Madigan’s thirteen-year search for Alyss across our world. Other stories pushed beyond the original trilogy, while new characters, histories and generations began revealing a much larger mythology.
Over twenty-five years, that mythology has grown across novels, graphic novels, audiobooks, music, art, games, apparel, and projects for film, television and the stage.
And it is still growing.
“The greatest satisfaction I’ve had in this whole endeavor is that I had faith in the story, and I had faith in the readers, and the two have found each other.”
A Love Story
Looking back on the journey from a manuscript nobody in America wanted to publish to a world that has occupied more than two decades of his creative life, Frank puts it simply:
“It’s not every day you find a project you want to devote years of your life to, and when you do, whatever the content might be, for you, personally, it’s a love story.”
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