Two weeks ago today, I got the message from my agent that Houghton Mifflin wanted to buy my YA novel, Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick, and I was ecstatic. I'd written the book back in February, and it had been turned down a few places, and I was starting to forget that it was out there. Ideally that's what happens when your work is making the rounds -- you're preoccupied with something new, and you don't sit around and stew about it.
Well, there wasn't much sitting around after Houghton Mifflin's offer. I accepted on the spot. A blurb in Publishers Marketplace described the book as "Ferris Bueller meets the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," and the next day I got an email from a producer asking if the film rights were available, and was there someone that she could talk to?
There was. I put her in touch with my film rights agent, Don Laventhall, who -- as it turns out -- had already gotten considerable interest in the book from studios and producers. Keep in mind at this point that the book deal was literally a week old. After months of nothing, things were happening with stomach-knotting speed.
By Monday of this week, my agent had sent the manuscript all over Hollywood, and the first offers were starting to roll in. By Tuesday afternoon, West Coast time, the bidding had gotten down to Paramount and Fox, both of whom wanted it badly enough to knuckle down and get serious when Don made it clear that he was going to close the auction that night.
In the end, the rights went to Paramount, who acquired it for producer Roy Lee, with Josh Schwartz and Wendy Savage's company Fake Empire potentially involved. Josh is the guy who created The O.C., Chuck and Gossip Girl, and in the middle of the bidding, he sent me an email saying, no matter what happened, how much he loved the book. To my mind, at least, his enthusiasm matches the madcap enthusiasm of the book itself. At its heart, Au Revoir is a middle-aged novelist's attempt to recapture what it feels like to be back in high school again, that simultaneous sense of anything-is-possible exhiliration and sheer adrenalized panic.
To say that I was flattered by every producer and studio who expressed interest in the project would be the understatement of the year. While it was happening, the whole thing felt totally unreal. And as the sun set in the west, those personal emails from Josh and Fake Empire, and the fact that Paramount was able to put together the absolute best deal all the way around, made all the difference. It goes without saying that I'm delighted with all of this, even moreso because it was all completely unexpected.
Crazy times, indeed.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Monday, August 02, 2010
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.
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.
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