Just a few days ago I finished reading a book called The Shark Curtain. The author’s name is Chris Scofield, and it’s her debut novel. Full disclosure: It’s entirely possible I never would have found it if not for the happy fact that Chris and I are both represented by the same agent -- Carrie Howland of Donadio & Olson (I may have mentioned her once or twice.)
As one might expect, I’ve become very interested in what kinds of books the agency (and Carrie specifically) represents. I’ll admit, I still have moments of feeling like I snuck into this whole writing world through a back door someone forgot to close all the way, or showed up at the party after finding someone else’s invitation on a sidewalk. Throughout this time it’s been fascinating to learn and experience so many new things, including having any kind of connection, no matter how tenuous, to a published book.
The Shark Curtain is told from the perspective of a girl named Lily
Asher as she’s growing up through her teenage years during the 1960s.
Lily’s life is occasionally complicated by both the dynamics of her
family and her own internal conflicts, which frequently have a way of
spilling out and affecting the world around her. I know that’s a vague
description but I don’t want to give too much away, especially
since there are so many layers to Lily as a character that I think would
be best discovered by reading the book, and I highly recommend people
do just that. As soon as I finished reading it, I walked around the
house in a sort of book hangover, knowing there wasn’t any more
story for me to read, but not quite being ready for it to end and not
quite sure what I was supposed to do with myself next after exiting the
book and re-entering my own world. Hopefully you're
familiar with that feeling, because it means you’ve been reading the
kinds of books that can take over your life.
Right after finishing Chris’s book, I started in on the manuscript of another one of Carrie’s clients, Rachel Simon, after she and I had been catching up on Facebook one night and got to talking about our manuscripts and decided to trade. It’s pretty common for writers to connect with other writers, and usually discuss or share their work. But for me at least, the experience of reading a published book, or one on its way there, and being able to express any ideas about it with the author is new enough to be an exciting novelty.
A good-sized cluster of us writers represented by Carrie have found each other online and have formed a nice, happy little socially-networked group (Team Howland shout out!). I had the chance to connect with Chris while I was reading her book. We’ve had some nice exchanges, and I can say she’s now responsible for about 80% of the movies currently listed in my Netflix queue (I almost don’t dare give her recommendations in return since she obviously has better taste than I do). For most of my life I've tended to narrowly identify an author with their writing instead of acknowledging the obvious truth that writing is a lot of made-up storytelling and can have very little to do with the person telling it. I feel I've gotten a few glimpses about why Chris was the perfect person to write The Shark Curtain, but now being on the writer side myself, I've appreciated getting to know her and the other Team Howland members as people, beyond what they write about.
I’ve always seen writing as a solitary endeavor. The first full-length manuscript I wrote to completion was mostly done between the hours of 12:00 and 3:00 AM during a summer break that saw my usual sleeping patterns shot to hell. I would take stabs at the research involved in querying agents, and occasionally would be lucky enough to encounter other writers who could relate to what I was trying to accomplish. All these years later, it's nice to find myself becoming more comfortable with the larger world of writing and the people who are a part of it.
As I write this, there's a HUGE publishing event taking place in New York -- BookExpo America. Some of the people I've mentioned here are attending and getting to meet people in the industry, and making new connections, and spending time surrounded by books and writing and all kinds of people who bring these things into the world. It's easy to feel slightly out of the loop being a thousand miles away from all of that, but then I'll remember that things might not always be that way, and maybe the time will come when it's my book leaving people stumbling through a reading hangover. Until then, it's great fun being able to see others experience that from a front row seat.
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