Archive for the ‘My Background’ Category

Lo Mein and Second Acts

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Occasionally on this blog I interview someone who has embarked on a second act — which I define as making a complete change in some area of your life at a time when you think you’re pretty much going to keep on doing what you’ve been doing for as long as you’re able. 

Today the person beginning her second act happens to be me.

I was talking to my delightful non-fiction agent a few weeks ago over plates of lo mein (although almost everything important in my writing career happens at the local coffeehouse, this was an exception).   I’d been looking for my “next thing” for a while.   I enjoy my work, but I’ve been doing it for a long time and wanted to shake things up.  Though I didn’t know exactly what my “next thing” was going to be, I knew I wanted to work with smart writers with great ideas.   I happened to mention this to Neil.

He got a glint in his eye — I now realize that when Neil gets that glint, it means your life is about to get turned over and shaken up, but I was more innocent then — and he said, “You should be a literary agent.  You’d make a great agent.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I know.”  (A becoming sense of modesty is not one of my strong suits.)  “But I’m a writer,” I pointed out.  I didn’t have to add, “in Kansas,” because he was sitting right there. 

The thing about Neil is that he can’t hear the construction “Yes, but.”  All he hears is “Yes.”

“Great,” he said.  “Let me talk to a few people.”

Which is how, a few weeks later, I found myself signing a contract with The Salkind Agency (part of Studio B Productions) as a literary agent. 

Yes, I’m leaving out the parts where a bunch of people do a lot of hard work to make sure this is the right step for everyone involved, but in retrospect, it seems like it was almost that easy.  You know how sometimes you just know when you’ve found the right thing to do and the right people to do it with, and they feel the same way?  That’s how this was.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting more about how things work at The Salkind Agency and the kinds of authors I’ll be representing (under the guidance of the amazing Neil Salkind), but for right now I’m looking at pretty much anything that could be classified as “smart writer, great idea.”  My agency email is jennifer at studiob dot com and more about The Salkind Agency can be found at www.salkindagency.com

So that’s my Monday.   More as we go along.

Tags: ,
Posted in My Background | 5 Comments »

The Warrior Lays Down Her Sword

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

I was five years old when I decided I wanted to make my living writing novels. It’s the only thing that has never changed about me. As I grew older, friends and family let me know how difficult it was to make a living as a writer. Becoming a writer, it seemed, was not a very practical plan. I listened to everyone else who told me what I should do instead, and I tried that for a while.

I went to college, then worked for an insurance company. I wrote novels in my spare time, and put them in my drawer. Now and then I’d send one out to an editor somewhere, and when it was rejected, I would be crushed and spend my evenings doing something else. Then the need to write another story would come along, and I would eventually write it, and put it in the drawer, too.

When I was in my late 20s, I started training in martial arts. Sometimes I think this was the first good idea I’d had all by myself that I didn’t need anyone else to endorse or validate. On the very first day, my instructor showed me how to kihop (the Korean word for the martial arts shout that you remember from all those Bruce Lee movies). I felt like I had finally found my voice. I learned that I could say something out loud, even a thing someone didn’t want to hear, and nothing awful would happen.

Of course, sometime later I found out that awful things could happen, but that’s another story for another day. In the meantime, I learned how to stand up for myself, to make choices for myself and to stop listening to other people. This experience actually led me to a writing career, although not exactly the one I had always sought. I began writing about martial arts, about women and empowerment. It was a wonderful experience and I don’t regret a minute of it. But it was not the kind of writing I had wanted to do from the time I was five.

When I was 40, a succession of mistakes, bad luck, fate (or possibly karma, but then I’d have to believe that I was a *really* bad person in a former life) and the accumulated fatigue of a long life of effort made me step away from everything I was doing and just say “stop.”

I had to find my voice again. I had to give myself a real chance to be the person I wanted to be. For me, that meant getting rid of pretty much everything I had (except the kid and the immensely cool dragon I got in Chinatown) and starting again from the ground up.

It’s now a few years later, and I’ve done enough navel-gazing to know that the lint isn’t going to reveal any secrets any time soon.

What now? That’s what this blog’s about. I hope you’ll chime in with your stories about your pivotal moments, your “what now”s, your second acts. Together we can figure out what works and what doesn’t and how we can build the life we want from the ground up.

Posted in My Background | 1 Comment »