I
come from a long-line of "spare time" artists. My mother was a painter.
My father, a photographer. Following in the family tradition, I
spent twenty years pursuing a literary career while I worked as
a print, and later, television reporter. I wrote plays in my spare
time. I wrote poems in my spare time. I wrote grants to write more
plays and poems in my spare time. But, despite the fact that the
poems were published and the plays were produced, I never felt that
I could give up my day job to write.
Then, my father was killed. He was just standing
on the sidewalk in front of the house he was born in, the house
he lived in all his life, when a young man reached down to change
the channel on his radio and lost control of his car. It all happened
in a moment, and in that moment I knew that no one has any "spare
time."
So, I left my "day job" shortly after that, and so
did my husband. He took care of the house and I wrote. We lived
off our savings. Two years later In the Company of Angels
was purchased by Hyperion.
Angels actually began as a graduate thesis.
300 plus pages which started with the sentence "She used to think
they had horns of white chocolate" and went on to prove that I could
create dialogue, plot --- and had some grasp of grammar.
I graduated but as a novel, my thesis read like homework.
So, I stripped it down to the bare plot, about 90
pages, and posted it on the novella line of Zoetrope's online writing
workshop. I asked fellow workshop members to tell me what worked
and didn't…and what they wanted to know more about.
The response was overwhelming, and very astute. So,
I began to rebuild. Three months later, I sent the new Angels
out to five agents. Three were interested. A month or so later Hyperion
bought it.
