Going Crazy

So I got some good news on Friday. My agent, Phyllis Westberg, emailed and told me that she'd sold my new novel, Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick, in a two-book deal to Houghton Mifflin.

This is exciting on a number of levels. First, because Au Revoir is technically a Young Adult novel, a genre that I hadn't really attempted before. In publishing terms, this simply means it's got a teenage protagonist (in Hollywood, they just call this smart marketing) -- although I didn't purposefully write it any differently than any of my other books. My goal was the same as it is every time I sit down to write, which is to amuse myself as I wade ever deeper into the uncharted waters of middle age.

In this case, I started thinking about what might happen if John Hughes had been hired to write La Femme Nikita. Basically, Au Revoir is about a high school kid with a female foreign exchange student living in his house, who turns out to be an international assassin with a one-night multi-kill job in New York City before she gets sent back home. As the night gets progressively wilder, our teenage hero gets roped into driving her around whether he likes it or not. The idea kind of drove me nuts, in a very pleasant way, like a pop song that you can't get out of your head...

...which is another reason this particular project was such a blast. I wrote it back in early February, and I was waiting to get the notes back from Del Rey on the book that would become Star Wars: Red Harvest. My part of the world was getting slammed with a series of snow storms, everything outside was very white, and suddenly I found myself sitting in front of the dining room window with the laptop open, just dying to write this story.

I think the first draft took me all of three weeks. I wrote it without hesitating or second-guessing myself, just having the time of my life on every page, and when I wasn't working on it, I was thinking about it -- what was going to happen next, and when I could jump back into it again. It was the most purely intuitive experience that I'd had since 2003, when I wrote the first draft of Chasing the Dead in radiography school, in my breaks between classes.

When I finished at the end of February, I made a few changes and showed it to two people. One was my wife, who read it and loved it, and the other was my friend Rob Swartwood -- who happens to be a very gifted writer, editor and anthologist, and whose forthcoming Hint Fiction anthology you should order right now. Rob read it, and he and I had lunch, and he told me all the places that needed work -- and he was right about almost all of it.

I did another polish, and my agent took it out...and Au Revoir started getting rejected. I think the rejections started in May or June, and continued into mid-July. I think maybe a half-dozen different houses turned it down, all for different reasons. Either they didn't like the characters, or they had something similiar already in the pipeline, or they just plain didn't dig it. These rejections were a bummer, but at the same time, I couldn't overlook the fact that everybody was passing on it for a different reason, which meant that maybe, somehow, given the right person, it might just hit the sweet spot.

On Thursday of last week, Rob texted me: "Any offers on the YA?" I told him not yet, but that I hadn't given up hope...although secretly, I was beginning to wonder if I'd written a dog -- a fun dog, but a dog nonetheless.

Then the next day, Phyllis emailed and told me about the offer. Houghton-Mifflin loved Au Revoir and not only wanted to publish it...they wanted a sequel too.

I've been through this moment several times now -- that moment when the offer arrives, utterly unexpected, out of nowhere. It gets me every time. I feel like I'm ten years old again, goofy and hopeful and weightless, like I've been drinking Jack and Cokes all morning. With The Unholy Cause and Death Troopers and Red Harvest, the process had been different, the offer extended tentatively at first and then solidified, the contracts signed and delivered long before I sat down to write Page 1. This was different. Compared to those things, this was high-wire work, no guarantees and no safety nets, and it was written for the sheer pleasure of writing it.

On Friday, I took my family out to lunch to celebrate, and I drove to work with the windows down listening to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky." I was forty years old, and I was about to publish my first Young Adult novel. Maybe I didn't exactly feel young -- but damned if I didn't feel at least a little bit less like an adult.

May we all be so fortunate as we wade ever deeper into the uncharted waters of middle age.