sarah eve kelly

It is Agent Appreciation Day. Today we celebrate our advocates, re-experience our astonishment and gratitude that someone so knowledgeable, so hard-working, and so excellently beyond cool believes in our work, and generally raise a toast to the people whose zeal brings us closer to our dreams.

My agent, Jenny Bent, until recently of the Trident Media Group, hung up her own shingle in March 2009 and has been jumping from strength to strength since, as any subscriber to Publishers’ Lunch will know. The Bent Agency has been so successful, in fact, that Jenny’s recently hired on a new agent, Susan Hawk, to handle young adult  and middle-grade authors. Jenny’s online presence is gentle, encouraging, savvy, and very occasionally whimsical. (Ref. a tweet from 18 Nov: ‘So sad that I ate all the skittles. I should have bought the economy bag’, followed up on 2 Dec by this: ‘Because skittles may in fact taste better than skinny feels.’ A woman very much after my own heart.) Her love for writers and writing shines through in her blog posts, in her tweets, in her constant advocacy, and (most importantly) in her emails to me.

The truth is, though, that there are a lot of agents like that. What sets Jenny apart is her willingness to nurture her authors, her awe-inspiring patience in the kind of market that makes editors demand that manuscripts be more or less press-ready, in a market where there’s no time or money or manpower to take the rough edges off the best work we have to offer. Jenny flouts that trend and takes the time.

Believe me, I know. When I started querying I was an agent’s nightmare. I was terrible at pitches, terrible at synopses (my stomach still churns just thinking of them), and my novel - if you’re kind - was rough, rudderless, and not remotely agent-ready. I got a lot of requests for material and they languished until Jenny came along. I queried, got a request within an hour, and within four days I was on the phone with her, discussing at length what a colossal shipwreck my manuscript was.

Here’s the cool thing, though: she still wanted me. She saw the good in the manuscript and wanted me. And over the course of six months, she helped me turn an idea for a good novel into a good novel; she taught me what a story is and made me a better writer. She’s been patient with my questions and my blunders; she’s been effusive over my successes; she’s always written back quickly; and she hasn’t been paid a penny for any of it. With tenacity like that, with belief like that, it’s really no wonder she’s one of the best literary agents in New York.

So Jenny, I raise my glass to you, and hope you get some much-deserved rest over the holidays. It’s very easy for a writer to be colossally self-absorbed, and most of the time I am. But it does me a service to remember, every now and again, exactly where I wouldn’t be without Jenny fighting for me.

Hug your agent. Do it now.

Till next time, &c &c.

I did a stupid thing last night, filed firmly under It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time.

Wait: back up. I’ve gotten into my story, as PG Wodehouse would say, like a scalded cat. Some context:

I am on submission. This means that I have written a novel and found a literary agent for it, and now that agent is trying to find me an editor - in other words, trying to sell my book. I will not lie and say that this is fun. In a way it’s more heart-wrenching even than querying, because rejections don’t mean that I can disappear back into anonymity and make my pitch or my manuscript better: all I can do is sit on my hands and wait. I will say that I think it’s Good For Me in the same way that querying was - it’s teaching me the business; it’s informing the artistic choices I’m making for my second novel; it’s making my skin thicker. It’s another induction.

My part in this phase of the process is small. I read editor comments, as forwarded by my agent, and I wear my t-shirt that says BRING IT ON day after day. I wait. I try to make myself as attractive as possible.

Enter last night.

Last night my husband and I went to a shabbos potluck, a modest dinner with some other graduate students, at which we ate spinach salad, quiche, and tiramisu and talked about the future, the universe, and traffic laws. It was a good night.

When I got home, I posted this to Twitter: I WALKED HOME WITH NO PANTS ON. NO PANTS AT ALL.

I woke up this morning to a flurry of replies: ‘What happened?’ ‘Oh God, Sarah, what have you done now?’ ‘Are we talking North American pants or British pants?’

I was mortified, and I deleted the tweet. Here is the story: I wore my favourite pair of jeans to this dinner. I’ve had them for years, and have been refusing for months to acknowledge their deterioration. At the dinner, I went outside to take a phone call, sat on a ledge, and heard a loud rip. I jumped up, realised what the sound was, and sat down again. Another rip.

The jeans were falling right off of me, half an hour’s walk from home. Worse yet, when I tried to walk, the rip dug into the back of one of my legs and scraped against it, causing indescribable pain. These jeans weren’t going without a fight.

I stayed as immobile as possible for the remainder of the night, leaning up against walls, taking tiny steps when I had to, and acting like nothing was wrong. When we had finished washing the dishes, Mike and I said our goodbyes and starting trooping off home with four other students. I made the best small talk I could, and walked as fast as I could in these jeans that were no longer remotely shaped to house my legs. Finally, enough forks in the road came that Mike and I were on our own. I braved about half a block - seriously, I don’t know what it was, but this tear felt like a dagger in the back of my leg - and then gave up and ran into a phone booth.

Reader, I took my jeans off. In a phone booth.

This isn’t as bad as it sounds. I was wearing a black mackintosh that reached just below my knees. As far as the world knew, I was wearing a mac with a skirt and heels. It was a warm night. Mike looked slightly askance, and I told him that he was welcome to walk twenty feet in front of me if he wanted to. But no: I looked perfectly civilised. The only thing that might have given me away was the folded - inasmuch as a shapeless shift of denim can be folded - pair of jeans in the crook of my elbow.

I came down with a fit of the giggles anyway, and when we got home, I tweeted that I had walked home with no pants on, which was perfectly true. But looking at the tweet in the unforgiving light of morning, I realised how it might look, and that I had to take better care of how I came across in public.

Back to being on submission. I have written the best novel I know how to write and I have gotten a supremely good agent for it. Now I’m waiting on a verdict. I have never once in this process gotten a rejection and thought that person rejected me because that person had no vision or didn’t care about art. I may have railed at the ceiling a little bit, of course, but in the end I still put my faith in the industry and do my best to acknowledge how little I know. Marketing, distribution, indigestion - I have come to the point in the merry-go-round at which my control over what happens next is severely limited.

It reminds me of a story my dad used to tell me when I worried about being popular. Don Juan and his friend, my dad told me, were going for a walk, when Don Juan stopped to tie his shoes. At that moment, an enormous boulder careened across the path about six feet in front of them.

The friend said, ‘Thank God you stopped to tie your shoes! Otherwise we would have been flattened by that boulder!’

Don Juan replied, ‘On another day, I might have stopped to tie my shoes right where the boulder landed, and we would have been flattened anyway.’

The friend said, ‘If that’s true, what control do we have over our destiny?’

Don Juan replied, ‘We can only do the best possible job of tying our shoes.’

And that’s all I can do: if I want to be a writer, my first duty is to write as well as I can as often as I can. If I want to be published, I can refrain from tweeting what might be interpreted as a confession of public nudity. That tweet reminded me of how much is, in fact, in my own hands. So from now on, I will have at my art with a will, and tweet with care.

Till next time, &c &c

This morning, in aid of putting off the monumental number of things I must accomplish today, I was reading my old LiveJournal posts. It may be a surprise to some of you that I have a LiveJournal account, and rightly so: I’ve been a very silent member since about 2003. I only signed up to read other people’s entries, and never got into the habit of posting myself, except when what I had to say wasn’t interesting or confident enough for my website.

I had a comparatively lucky querying experience. I started in June 2008 with a very mediocre draft of my novel, and signed with my agent in early October. Still: the summer of 2008 was the longest summer of my life. Also it rained a lot. But on 16 June - almost a year ago, now - I did a brave thing: a sort of querying version of counting my blessings. For all you out there at some point in the process, it might be an interesting read, so I’m posting it here.

I find it especially poignant because my agent is currently submitting my manuscript to editors (Dear Editors: I’m Really Nice), so I’m waiting in another way now. So, herewith: the state of Sarah’s mind on 16 June 2008, about a fortnight into the querying process.

&&&

I feel the need to say this while I’m still in the tall grass, viz agentless: I think the process of finding representation is a good one. From everything I’ve read, and everything I’m going through, I can’t imagine a more symbiotic way of acclimatising the virgin author to the publishing world.

Not sarcasm. I really mean it.

Here’s what you do: you finish your book (this is very important), you edit your book (also important), and when it’s the best you think you can make it (which is different from it being the best it can be), you spend approximately two months (in my case) putting together a query letter and synopsis (this is dreadful). After this, you trawl online for hours and hours building up a shortlist of agents you’d like to query (in my case, all across the ocean, because there isn’t a single British citizen who isn’t sick to the tits of Anne Boleyn, it seems). Adhering to guidelines and personalising each letter, off they go, your first ten queries, into the world.

And then you wait.

Boom: rejection #1. Boom: rejection #2. Myself, I created several folders in my Gmail: “Queries”, “Submissions Awaiting Response”, “Failed Attempts” (this is where I put my rejections instead of throwing them away), and glee of glees, “Partial/Full Requested”. They are cross-referenced. This, and smoking: the only fully organized parts of my life.

I’m still waiting. The waiting is horrible. Horrible. I can’t stress it enough with the horrible. But I get this slightly nauseating feeling that it’s good for me. Because it seems that publishing itself is a waiting game: one needs to be accustomed to waiting. It still means that one lives on New York time and one refreshes one’s email until the page crashes. I’ll have to be a bit more grown-up than I am now before that stops happening.

But here’s the other thing that’s good: once you’ve got an agent, you’ve got an agent. In the Panglossian case (”our noses were made to carry spectacles, and behold! So they do”), it seems the author and the agent come together in the best of all possible worlds, to each do what each does best. In the author’s case, to write, to learn, to follow instructions; in the agent’s, to sell, to mentor, to set up High-Powered Meetings with Important People. And each side is equally motivated, for whichever reasons. As I read it earlier this morning: your agent has no reason to sit on her hands. She’s just as invested in selling your book as you are.

I thought once I sent my manuscript out to Important People I would go mad finding errors in the text or worse yet, thinking it was worthless - curiously, this hasn’t happened. I’m starting to genuinely see the merit and the novelty in the story. I wonder if maybe I’ve been on drugs for the past month.

I know this probably sounds hopelessly naive. But when I’m feeling good about this process, I need to record it. For posterity like. So there it is. On this Monday, with the smell of sweet fig and cinnamon toast in the air, at 9:58 am in London and (sigh) 4:58 eh em in New York, I feel good. We’ll see how long it lasts.