GENREALITY

At what moment did writing, for you, turn from being just a hobby to play around in to something you took seriously enough to create a salable novel, and a resulting career?

I actually have two stories one for non fiction, which lead to a 21-year career as a journalist. The other of how I came to be an author. I’m going to tell you the latter.

I was at the TV Critics Press Tour about seven years ago. At an ABC party I had a slight mishap (read: I tripped on my flip flops and almost did a face plant in the middle of the horseshoe gardens at the Ritz in Pasadena, now known as the Langham). I was completely mortified and ran to the corner near some bushes where a friend of mine stood surveying the party.

It was the normal network soiree with lots of celebrities standing around wondering which one of them was the most important. It really is like that. My friend, Paulette Cohn, who writes for ET online, started talking about books. My non-fiction book “Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy” had just come out, and she made the comment that I should try my hand at writing fiction.

I told her she was crazy, I could never do anything like that. She told me that if I ever did, she knew a great editor at a publishing house.   I returned home a week later and wrote my first novel in about two weeks. It was God awful. No, I mean, really, really bad. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time.

I’ve never told anyone this story, but I actually emailed her friend, the editor, with a brief query, something I hadn’t a clue how to write. He was quite kind and told me that he didn’t really have a place for a 35,000 word novel, that might be a romance. Yes, I’d actually said those words in the query. Sigh. My only saving grace was that years later he didn’t remember what I’d done, and I never said a word.

With that one rejection I decided my career as an author was over. Then something crazy happened. A new family moved in next door. The mom of the family happened to be a columnist, just like me, and she too had written a book. We agreed to swap manuscripts.

After reading the first three pages of hers, I called and told her I wanted mine back. She declined. A week later we swapped again. I had a found a few typos on hers, but the prose was nearly perfect. My manuscript was red from the first page to the last. But she wrote something that kept me from giving up: “You are a great storyteller and have an amazing voice.”

From that moment on, everything sort of went on a fast track. I polished that manuscript and then began another one. I only slept about four hours a night for more than six months. Within the year I had an agent and my first book sold to Berkley. My friend had sold her book, about five months earlier to Warner.

The truth is, it might have been a higher power. It could have been a lucky string of coincidences. But from the time I decided I wanted to write a novel, until I was published was about 14 months. Now, I can’t imagine not writing fiction. I live for it. My second book, Charmed & Dangerous, was the first one to sell. The very first book I wrote, was completely revised and became “The Demon King and I,” which was my fifth published novel.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Related posts:

1. Don’t Hammer the Funny
2. The Next Thing
3. No Such Thing as Writer’s Block