Wednesday, May 31, 2006

I can hardly believe it

but I've got wonderfully good news, the best possible news (well, you know what I mean, of course the world is in a dire way & it would be nice to stop global warming/the war in Iraq/childhood mortality etc., but from a strictly selfish point of view I cannot think of anything better): it's now definite and I can say it here, HarperCollins Children's Books will publish Dynamite No. 1. I will be working with a most wonderful editor, Ruth Katcher (aside from her general excellence she also edits one of my favorite writers ever, and a ton of other great stuff too); and my agent is the amazing Liz Gately at Anderson Grinberg. The book will be published in 2008, with a sequel called The Snow Queen to follow.

It occasionally impinges on my consciousness that I am overly book-obsessed, I would not think it at all sound if someone told me that their happiness was almost entirely dependent on whether they (a) got a decent amount of writing done that day and (b) had a publisher for their novel. I would tell that person that she should have a better sense of proportion, that it's bad enough to care so desperately about the work--at least that's in your control, more or less, and surely it's inevitable that how much work you get done will affect how you feel--but it's completely insane to let your state of mind depend on something as out-there-in-the-world as what happens to your novel once you've written it. It is important to have a good balance between different elements in life, and after all other things are valuable too (can you hear how half-hearted I sound as I say that?).

So despite the sensibleness of this advice I have completely neglected to follow it myself, and there is no doubt that I have spent part (sometimes a quite large part) of every single day over the last two years worrying about this novel, either (profitably) in terms of actually working on revisions or (less sensibly) fretting about what its worldly fate would be. It is therefore particularly if not very moral-example-ly delightful to have this happy, happy outcome.

(In fact, this blog was born of my desire as I was finishing the first good draft of the book to chronicle its path towards publication, only I realized in a mortifying but funny vanity-of-human-wishes-type vein that I had been ludicrously premature and that a day-by-day chronicle of the book's path to publication would at that point have been a shameful exercise in self-flagellation! NB since I wrote that post I un-quit smoking, then properly re-quit and have not smoked since the beginning of September, but have consumed vast amounts of very strong coffee in the intervening months....)

14 comments:

  1. Wonderful wonderful news!

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  2. Congratulations! What great news. Can't wait to read your book!

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  3. I am foolishly delighted by this news Jenny - so very very glad that you have gotten to this point. I'm really looking forward to reading your book and completely plan on reviewing it in a major way for Bookslut. It completely sounds like the sort of book I've been aching to read and I can't wait.

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  4. Yay! I can't wait! Huge congratulations!

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  5. Congratulations! I'll look forward to reading it too.

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  6. Congratulations! I'm obsessed with Edinburgh -- the actual place and various fictional renditions of it. I can't wait to read your Edinburgh!

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  7. FABULOUS NEWS and I do not think you are being at all disproportionate and I am very pleased that you are still not smoking almost two weeks back into New York!!!

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  8. Thank you all so much, it is very decadent to be able to reap congratulations like this!

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  9. I'm a bit late to the party, but may I add my congratulations? So pleased and thrilled for you.
    Does this mean your blog will now fulfil its intended purpose? I am prepared to be regaled with a blow by blow account of the road to publication, and then, will you give us a Sara Gran style misery-depressed account of what next, or bright and breezy Lipstick Chronicles stories of life on the marketing trail? I am sure something idionsyncratically Jenny D will transpire, and not either of those -- can't wait.

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  10. Jenny!!! Congratulations!! I could not be happier for you and am counting the days till I get my copy. (And let's hope you DON'T HAVE a sara-gran style misery story about it, although I'm flattered that's now what it's called!)

    xxoo

    Sara

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  11. Jenny - this is stonking news. Incredible. Hurrah!

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  12. You wrote:

    I would not think it at all sound if someone told me that their happiness was almost entirely dependent on whether they (a) got a decent amount of writing done that day and (b) had a publisher for their novel.

    I would think it unsound if you didn't feel this way. You're a writer. How else should you view your life? We are, as writers, unable to be sound anyway.

    Congratulations on your contract.

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  13. Terrific, happy news!

    Congratulations!

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