Progress Report: 5/24/2010

So I wrote the agent who's looking at Rose & Jade, and nothing terrible befell me. A crack did not open up in the ground to swallow me up, and I was neither struck blind nor covered with boils. Peculiar, isn't it? I do have a sore shoulder, but I think that can be traced to a more obvious cause.

Anyway, the agent says that he is now showing my story to a few other readers to get a consensus. He tells me that this is a time-consuming process and apologizes for the slowness. All this sounds fairly promising to me. My limited experience with agents so far is they don't need any kind of consensus to tell them what they don't like, and it's not time-consuming when they're telling you to blow off (generally, they're very polite about it, so don't take that to mean they're deliberately mean. It's still no fun). I know that a project has many chances to de-rail and it could easily happen any time, but it is kind of encouraging to have gotten a little farther down the tracks this time.

Also: I now have a laptop! A fine Mac laptop inherited from my good friend Andrew, and much more potent than anything I could have afforded to buy. Now it's a matter of getting some writing done on it. Work continues to dominate, but the end of this stretch is in sight. Perhaps a couple more weeks before the schedule settles back into something that permits breathing and a re-channeling of creative energy.

Work itself can be very rewarding, at least. Sometimes I get to work with material that is simply outstanding, as was recently the case. I have been writing the copy for an audio program with Howard Thurman, and it's been amazing to listen to him. He was Martin Luther King's spiritual mentor, to create the historical context, and I thought that the hook for the package copy would be about Thurman's legacy, his place in the Civil Rights movement, and that sort of thing. What I realized is that if someone walked into the studio and recorded the same material off the street, it would still be awesome.