I started writing and publishing long enough ago (other publishers, other names, other story) to remember when it was common to speak of this as a “gentlemen’s agreement” business. Meaning that a handshake was as binding as a signed contract.
Quite apart from the non-p.c. aspect of the use of “gentlemen” to mean all writers and all publishers, that seems a quaint concept in the litigious twenty-first century in America (indeed, in the West). But there is a very important sense in which it is still true. The use of the phrase belongs to a time when few writers had agents, but even now when 99% of them do, the “my word is my bond” aspect still applies to at least one part of the process. When an agent and an acquiring editor say, “Deal!,” it is indeed a deal. So while the contracts department may take weeks to churn out the legalese agreed to in the negotiation – even when it’s all boiler-plate it seems to take them weeks – and the check usually doesn’t show up until many, many more weeks have passed, it is indeed rare for that original commitment to be in any way abridged or abrogated. When the call comes to tell you the book is sold, it is indeed sold.
So it should come as no surprise that while information about the next book in the tale of the Turners and the Devreys in old New York has been on this website since the October launch, I actually signed the contract with Simon & Schuster only recently, and the ”on signing” payment showed up in my bank account just days past. That aside, I knew the deal was in place and that I was definitely to write the book last September. As for the book itself – I did the research over the past year, and during the summer wrote the first 20-or-so-percent of the story and the matrix that I do instead of an outline. (See City of Promise – terrible title and so far nothing better has surfaced – at the Novels section of this site for more on all that.)
The point of this year-end ramble is that once 2007 is well and truly here I must return to Mai-lin and Christopher Turner and Samuel Devrey. I must navigate that enormous leap that is one of the most terrifying imaginable, no matter how many books you have written – the jump across the chasm between the story in your head and the one on the page. And I must take that leap while I am still deep in the process of talking about (i.e. promoting though I hate the word) City of Glory, which is officially born on January 9th, though we started shipping books to bookstores the middle of December. And while my contract says I have until January of 2008 to turn in the completed ms, I have promised my editor that I will try to have the book done well before that. And remember, this is still a business where one’s word is one’s bond…
So, in the New Year, it begins and I must court the writing gods yet again….
I hope 2007 is a successful writing year for all of you. (And for me, she adds, fingers crossed. Because there’s never any guarantee the magic can be summoned once more…)