I hate firing people.

I made the difficult decision this week to fire my longtime literary agent. This was a tough decision to make, since I consider him a friend. But friendship or not, things weren't working out from a business perspective and I needed to start fresh. So I fired him---which I frankly should have done a long time ago. But I let emotions cloud my judgement for too long and it took a whole series of mishaps before I finally broke down and did it.

We parted amicably and remain friends though, which is good. But firing people----especially people you personally like----is never fun. I guess that's why I will never cut it as a corporate manager type like Steve Carrell plays on The Office. I get too sentimentally attached to people to fire them. I'd never be able to conduct mass layoffs, either, having been a victim of them too many times myself. Merely parting ways with my literary agent made me so sad I was literally sick to my stomach for days.

I think the lesson here is not to mix friendship with business. I am querying new agents and already have several strongly interested in me, which is great (and a big change from my long and very difficult search for my first agent). I guess the luxury of having a choice is, I can really take the time to interview and vet all the prospective agents and choose the one who has the best chance of taking my career to the next level. And I don't plan to become good friends with the agent, either. Strictly business, that's all. That way, if things don't go well, I can move on to the next one without getting nauseous.

Peace

Pre-Order "Me" on Amazon. . .

My debut novel under my pseudonym "Jamaica Layne", MARKET FOR LOVE, is now available for pre-order on Amazon by clicking here. There's no cover art yet, but there should be soon. I proofed my galleys and sent them back to the publisher about 2 weeks ago. The book will be in US and UK stores on October 14, 2008.

It's been a long, hard road to this point, but I'm proud that I'll finally have a book all my own (I've been in anthologies before, which is much different) in bookstores by the end of the year.

Peace.

Not bad for a playwright who's no good

I have to do a bit of gloating today. Those of you who've known me for a while probably know that I spent almost 7 years trying to get into the Residency program at Chicago Dramatists. I applied 5 times in a little over 6 years. Every time, I was turned down for being supposedly "not strong enough" of a writer. This notwithstanding the fact that I had more productions and more play publications on my playwriting resume than several playwrights that were already in the residency program. (hmmm?) The last time I applied (and was rejected yet again), I was basically told by the Chicago Dramatists' artistic director to stop applying, since, in his words, "it's just not going to happen" ("it" meaning: my playwriting career).

Ouch.

This was really devastating to me, since it is very, very hard to be taken seriously as a playwright in Chicago if you are not part of the Chicago Dramatists residency program. After that last stinging rejection, I honestly believed them when they told me my career was never going to happen.

Well, since being told that I'm not good and my playwriting career is never going to happen, the following has occurred:

• My play INTELLIGENT DESIGN was named a finalist in two prestigious national contests, and is now under consideration at several theaters
• I've had readings and productions of my plays in 10 US states, Canada, and the UK
• My new play A MATTER OF CONVENIENCE will be read in New York City this spring
• One of my plays ("The Devil Is In The Details") was included in the anthology Best American Short Plays 2004-05, alongside works by Pulitzer and Tony winners (Paula Vogel, David Lindsay-Abaire, Terrence McNally)

Not bad for somebody whose plays are no good, huh?

On another note, A Chicago playwright (Tracy Letts) who has no affiliation whatsoever with Chicago Dramatists just won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I guess that means there's hope for me, too.

Peace.

Got proof?

I got my editors' proofs today for my erotica novel, MARKET FOR LOVE---which makes me feel more and more like a "real" author. For those of you who don't know, editors' proofs are the preliminary page mockups of the actual printed pages of a bound book. The "page" is shrunk down to about one-fourth of its actual size, and surrounded by large margins where proofreaders and editors can make notes. I'll be spending the next week or so combing my book line by line, looking for typos and misplaced commas. The publisher also employs professional proofreaders to do this, but they like to give authors the opportunity to do a final proofread as well. This should be interesting, since MARKET will be released first in the UK, and some of my original American-style punctuation has been replaced with British-style (such as replacing American quotation marks---"----with the British inverted comma----'. Ironically, at first glance it looks like they've Anglicized some of the punctuation but refrained from replacing American spellings with British ones----i.e., "honor" for "honour."

In other news, I have conceded defeat in The Shoe Wars. I have relegated myself to wearing cheap slip-on ballerina shoes from Old Navy indoors, which my hubby will allow so long as I never wear those shoes outside. I suppose I'm beginning to appreciate the benefits of not wearing shoes indoors, since the past few weekends my hubby and I have been looking at houses for sale in Arlington Heights. Many of the realtors showing those houses specifically ask prospective buyers to take their shoes off (or at least cover them with surgical footies) to prevent mud and dirt from being tracked all over the place. Indeed, one of the cleanest houses we've looked at was obviously owned by Asian people (it was decorated with lots of Asian stuff) and the realtor commented that the floors and carpets in the house were so clean because the owners never wore shoes inside. (My husband jumped all over that, of course.) So alas, it seems my feet are doomed to be bare forever.

Peace.