Continuing my series, The Evolution of the Book, this is the story of the temporary elation of a book deal that came through from what will be called Huge Publishing House… but this is far from the end of the story. Here's the original emotion, no awareness at all of the storm clouds overhead...

*

Okay. Tuesday, as I'm folding laundry and trying to help my son find a snack and start on his homework, I get a phone call. And this person says, Are you busy, is this a good time to talk?

And I say something like, Go ahead, I'm always busy.

And then she says, I'm calling from Huge Publishing House. And like a fairy godmother, she tells me the things I've needed to hear for I don't know how many years - that she loves my writing and my book and the characters - and soon I find I'm not exactly listening because I'm thinking Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God.

And then she asks me if I have any questions, and I answer, Oh my God.

And then she says more things and says she'll actually give me money for my book, and I tell her I love her because I do - it's that easy to get me to fall in love.

She's still talking, of course, because that's the normal thing to do during a phone call, but once again I'm not quite listening because I'm thinking, I wonder if this moment isn't true? I wonder if this is a cruel dream that I'm about to wake up from or if I've gone mad and started hallucinating? And then I hear her ask me to think about the offer and to give her a call, and I tell her I've already thought long and hard about it and the answer is yes and please send the contract right away before I wake up.

The problem with phone calls is that, after you hang up, there's no document you can refer back to that says, Hello this is Huge Publishing House and we love your book and want to buy it. So instead of being happy, which I was - unbelievably so - but only for a moment, I started feeling that more familiar sensation that something I'd wanted so badly would turn out to be a rejection. And it felt like years waiting for some written confirmation that all of this actually happened, and even now it really feels too good to be true.

Those of you who know me well know I have a strange phobia about sharing good news, so in saying all of this, I am going against my belief in The Power of the Jinx, but here goes:

In spring of '08, or thereabouts, I will actually have a novel coming out. I know the majority of you understand how it is to collect years and years of rejection letters and to hear people around you questioning how you spend your time. After a while, you start to wonder youself if maybe you just suck and you shouldn't waste your time writing.

What a trip. What an absolutely unbelievable trip to have someone tell you you don't suck afterall. Man, if I could give that feeling to every one of you . . . .

TAGS: fleeting hope, LitPark, Susan Henderson, the first book deal that will not end well, The Nervous Breakdown, TNB

SUSAN HENDERSON's debut novel, UP FROM THE BLUE, will be published by Harper Collins in September 2010. She is Curator of NPR’s newest literary venture, "DimeStories," produced by Jay Allison (of "This I Believe"), and is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award and grants from The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and The Lojo Foundation. Her work has—twice—been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Publications include Zoetrope, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, South Dakota Review, The MacGuffin, Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies (nominated for a Pushcart Prize, 2004), North Atlantic Review, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Opium, Other Voices, Amazon Shorts (nominated for a Pushcart Prize, 2006), The World Trade Center Memorial, The Future Dictionary of America (McSweeney’s Books, 2004), The Best American Non-Required Reading (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), Not Quite What I Was Planning (HarperPerennial, 2008), and Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years (Snowvigate Press, 2009). She blogs at LitPark.com, and occasionally at Huffington Post and Brad Listi’s The Nervous Breakdown. Her husband is a costume designer, filmmaker, and tenured drama professor. They live in NY with their two boys.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Evolution of the Book, LitPark. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.