The Story of a Book: Writing Without Rules
I’d like to lodge a complaint. As a kid growing up, I imagined my career choice of “writer” would be filled with adventure and private jets, possibly an estate in Hawaii where my own personal private detective would routinely borrow my sports car.1 Every single television show and film that had a writer as a character typically showed them in full-on Castle mode, wealthy, and (for some reason) solving crimes, and I wanted that life.2
The reality of the author-agent relationship has turned out to be … different.
CRIME-SOLVING CATS
I found my agent, Janet Reid, wayyyyy back in 2002, utilizing stone tablets and smoke signals. OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that primitive, but I mail her an actual paper query letter. The fact that she signed me as a client set the model for our relationship, in my mind: I would write whatever I felt like, she would think it was a work of absolute genius and sell it immediately.
