First Blog: From Maine to New York

How hard can it be to get from Maine to New York? Friday night (1/5/07) I was editing my first novel while waiting in the Portland airport for hours. They announce that Kennedy is closing due to weather delays. I rebook myself on a flight the next morning and call my husband, Henry. He says he’ll drive in to get me and leaves our twelve -year-old son babysitting his sleeping younger sister.

I get a call on my cell from Henry, “I’m okay, but the car is totaled.” A sudden rainstorm had made the car hydroplane off the highway into a ditch. Some college students, one a former boy scout, stopped to help. By two in the morning we are all back home in Brunswick, minus one Subaru. Henry doesn’t even have a scratch.

At the NYC Party: Petria, Me, Cathy, Jen, Llisa, Amy and Deb

On three hours of sleep, I still enjoy my friend’s party in New York Saturday night (1/6/07). She is the first of my Dalton School friends to turn forty and does it with style. There must have been thirty people there, and I talk to maybe twenty. Petria May, in peacock blue Pucci, quit law to open a vintage clothing store in the Berkshires. Llisa Demetrios, a sculptor from California wine country, bemoans the rising cost of bronze since 9/11. A New York investment banker reads only electronic books. He’s reading War and Peace on his Blackberry one sentence at a time. I promise a book group that I’ll visit when (and if) my novel gets published.

As I leave, my hostess asks if I met their friend the editor who just got promoted at a good publishing house.

What editor? Oh, well.

On Monday (1/8/07) it's raining sideways. I borrow a raincoat and umbrella from my mother and head out in a short skirt and high-heeled flower power boots to meet Jean Naggar, my agent, for a 12:30 lunch at A La Turka on East 74th. Only a few blocks from arriving on time, a man in a wheelchair asks, “Miss, can you help me?” He’d scattered about 20 quarters all over the sidewalk. What would the ethicist say? I bend down to help him, and my hair blows wildly in the wind. I’m wet and running late. I arrive at an empty restaurant and go downstairs to fix myself up. My hand comes away from the banister brown with varnish, but it scrubs off. It’s now 12:45 so I call my agent’s assistant only to learn that the time was meant to be 1:00. By then I’ve had time to look back over my manuscript.

Jean is always a delight and her enthusiasm infectious. She brought along her daughter Jennifer Weltz, who handles their foreign and film rights, because she thinks we have a lot in common. We do. Their advice is helpful and well worth the trip. I come home re-energized to tackle the final revisions. There is more rewriting than writing to creating a novel.

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