Jiggity Jog

Home again from my never ending trip up north. I'm tired, but it was all so worthwhile. Here's a synopsis of what I learned:

I have to go to New York more often. I don't know why I treat it as some big deal. But it was almost immediately apparent upon my arrival that there's no substitute for actually meeting with editors and agents face to face - for being a real person to them and not just a voice on the phone or an email address. The standard thing everyone says about editors....ie, that they're distracted and overworked....is actually quite true. When you're there sitting across a dining table from them you move, even if just for that hour, to the top of the pile and have their true focus and attention. I got more feedback in four days than I've gotten in a year at home.

The first day I went to Grand Central, ostensibly to meet with the publicity director about my first book, Love in Mid Air, the one that's coming out in March. And meeting the publicity person is a big deal, but I also had the secret tiny hope that my editor, who received the second book, The Gods of Arizona two weeks ago, would like it enough to make me an offer. An offer on Gods would solve a bucketload of problems, some of the financial and some of them emotional. A lot of novelists are one-hit wonders who spend years writing the first book (God knows I did) and then either never produce another or wait so long to produce another that everyone forgets about them, including their own publishing house. So if she committed to a second book I'd feel like I was really developing a career with my publisher, that my first book wasn't just a matter of "let's throw this against the wall and see if it sticks."

So I get off the elevator and almost the first thing she says is that she's sorry, but she hasn't finished the second book. In fact she had just started it and was only about 70 pages in. We soldier on, talking about publicity for the first book and what they will do (spend time) and won't do (spend money) to promote it. As we're all heading out to lunch, I'm swapping my heels for flats for the walk and make some comment about protecting my feet and we end up talking about my passion for ballroom dancing. I say, honest-to-God casually, that I want to eventually write a book about a ballroom dance studio and my editor just lights up. She loves the idea.

So now I'm thinking that maybe there's a third book in the works and that maybe even she'll buy the second book, for which I have a draft, and the third book, for which I have a one-line concept. It's unlikely on one level....everyone is saying that the market sucks, that it's an impossible time to come out with any sort of book at all, and that publishers have stopped giving big advances or multi-book deals. But on another level I saw that she was excited about the ballroom dancing idea and her interest in book three might nudge her to make a decision on book two. When I talked to my agent the next day, he thought so too.

After that I couldn't get this mythical third book off my mind. Started taking notes for it on the train back to Massachusetts, free-wrote on it during the writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg (more on that later), and was scribbling more notes while driving south on I-95 on Monday. And it seems crazy in a way to always be moving ahead developing new ideas before previous ideas are sold or even consolidated in your mind, but that seems to be how things have to work. Not every idea pans out....who are we kidding? Most ideas don't pan out. So you have to have a lot of them in order to survive this nervous marketplace. And then psychologically I need to feel like all my eggs aren't in one basket.

So....I'm tired, but it was a productive trip on all sorts of levels. I'll report more later.