…yet now that it’s here, I still haven’t thought of a way to sound clever at it, because I am just too damned cheerful.
I have just signed with Connor Goldsmith of Foreword Literary.
A writer’s relationship with an agent is incredibly important, and there are a whole lot of variables that go into making the right choice, on both sides. I’m confident that we have, and I’m so excited about working together.
The last couple of weeks have been interesting and volatile ones for me, with major changes on several fronts. But saying “changes” makes it sound like I’m talking about single events, like lightning strikes or lottery wins. I should rather say “fruitions”. Change has been happening for a long time. It is always happening, under the surface, and only sometimes does it come to light.
This particular fruition, I greeted with some dear friends, some extremely loud music, and some Death in the Afternoon. (Hemingway’s advice on this recipe is “Drink three to five of these slowly.” I maintain that drinking three to five of them quickly is also worthwhile.)
It’s been an excellent couple of weeks on the short fiction front, also–a couple of sales that haven’t been announced yet, and one for which I signed the contract this morning (“Four Steps to the Perfect Smoky Eye”, to Strange Horizons).
Right now it feels like quite a while since the days of grocery store markdown pie for breakfast, army boots with the steel toes scraped bare, and all my writing done in the back pages of coffee-stained spiral notebooks or on the ancient Smith Corona given to me by a writer friend. (Past self: it gets better!) Here’s hoping for even greater fruition to come.
I am ecstatically happy for you, Claire. Getting a good agent was the best thing that happened to me in 2013–yes, even better than the novel deals–and I wish you the same streak of good luck I enjoyed after landing that agent.
Thank you! And that's an especially powerful statement given how great your novel deals were. (I'm almost to the end of Lines of Departure, by the way… with pauses for dramatic readings of Sergeant Humphrey's lines!)