Riddle Me Middles

What do you say when your whole world is suddenly more awesome?

April 23rd, 2008 at 6:51 am (Unaussprechlichen)

I just signed a contract with a totally kickass literary agent at a reputable agency!

(It was late at night when I asked, so I don’t remember whether it’s OK to post her name. For now, I will play it safe.)

Coy smart-aleck framing tricks fail me. This is purely and simply a fantastic piece of news that I’m finally willing to let out. After some going back and forth and some editing and other goodness, she contacted me with the good news on the day before my birthday, about a week ago. I immediately called the spouse who was awake at the time and whooped wildly into the phone. Then I wrote notes to thank a couple of persons also responsible for improving the quality of The Shadow Parliament — that’s the novel ms. in question — and for putting me in touch with S., the agent. Then I ran across the hallway to snag the other English teacher here for a celebratory birthday dinner at Pizza Hut.

It tasted like winning.

Although I don’t want to reveal too many details (I wish I could more openly thank the person who made an introduction for me, but I think that would expose said person to unwelcome attention) I’ll just say that this chain of events can be traced to the MFA program I attended, both in terms of writing and improving the novel and in terms of getting it out there. I think it helped that I went in with just one expectation: that I would have a solid two years in which to write, and some valuable input from some pretty smart cookies about what I was writing.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I’m damn jazzed up about it.