By Jerald Flynn
In late 2007 I signed a contract with a small, fairly well renowned literary agency in New York. The contract itself was very official looking, and, obviously I suppose, impeccably well written. It was explained to me that the person representing me was young, new to the business, and that she would be limited to a few projects she had picked herself and was passionate about. Allow me here to give my agent a pseudonym. I’ll call her Z. It was implied that success or failure would go both ways, and that if Z could sell my manuscript (or parts of it), she would cement her place among the literati. Her faith in me as a writer might serve as a golden ticket to martini soaked soirees on the Upper East Side where she would mingle with editors and the types of socialites who had never been inside a commercial airliner, not to mention a bus station. For my part I would crank out something brilliant every few years, and she would boast about discovering me. And if not, well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles. I was like a young tech company, and she was a new investment banker who had added me to her portfolio, a risk, sure, but one with plenty of potential.
It must be noted that Z, for her part, was brilliant. She was bold and blunt and at the same time sensitive. She gave me feedback, and I took it. Knowing I was in medical school, she gave me generous deadlines, and I never pushed them. I could not have asked for a better agent or editor. By the end of March that next year, she said it was ready. The manuscript, Z said, was a favored project; she had high hopes of selling it.
The waiting was probably the best part. It was also the worst part. I had nagging, anxious thoughts in which I undermined myself for being too prolix, or daft, or delusional. I wondered if anyone was buying books anymore, and that even if Z did sell it would it ruin her if it only sold nine copies and was panned by the one reviewer who would stoop to read it.
I assuaged these fears by reminding myself that Z had gone to Harvard. For a lifelong public school attendee who had never even seen an Ivy League school, that meant something. I could not allow myself to believe that Harvard accepted, educated, and graduated anyone who wasn’t capable of succeeding. Harvard, I reasoned, doesn’t produce flakes.
The middle of this story is really boring, so I’ll spare you. In the end, my stock, if we want to stick to that analogy, went to zero. Z never bothered to call or write when her budding career was nipped, so I went months with nothing. At first I placated myself with the trite mantra of no news is good news.
As it turned out, no news was bad news.
My literary career lasted 357 days. On December 3, 2008, after making a few calls and sending a few e-mails, I received an anemic reply from Z’s former boss, informing me that Z was no longer “associated” with the agency. I read the subtext clearly: her career was dead. I intuited that none of her projects were successful, and that every bit of speculation she’d done as a literary investor had ended badly. No one had been interested, and I was free to do with my manuscript whatever I pleased.
I was fine, obviously. Writers, in general, are poor, but not when their day job requires a medical degree. Instead of writing and submitting manuscripts, I settled on putting little hidden flourishes in medical charts, arcane descriptors of character and quirk that would largely go unnoticed in that ocean of excess verbiage. These things would occasionally bring me a fleeting whiff of pleasure, but would rarely scratch the itch.
Z, on the other hand, is now an author herself. She writes period romance fiction, self published and for sale on Amazon.com. I’ve read some of it. It’s about what one might expect from period romance fiction self published on Amazon.com.
