Progress Report: 11/8/2010

The plot is thickening up on the agent front.

This week's news has a different agent asking to represent my novel. Which is... yay! With complications.

The first thing is, I did agree to inform the first agent if there was any other offer on the book, and to give her the a chance to say whether she's interested or not. So I'm waiting to hear back from the first (potential) agent, and I'm not sure how long that takes. I have horrifying visions of my emails somehow being netted in a spam filter, but I'm going to take it on faith that that's paranoia in action.

The second thing is that the new agent doesn't normally represent Young Adult books, which is somewhat of a concern. The first (potential) agent does. So... yeah. You can see how this is qualified good news. Still, I think it is important to remember that it is very good news indeed!

Champagne still pending.

So on other fronts, yesterday we went and saw Hereafter. First off, Clint Eastwood is a treasure, no amount of appreciation can do him justice. I felt the film spoke profoundly to my own life. It's not because I relate personally to the near-death experience--I haven't had one. Much of the film's focus is not about the experience itself, but how people relate to you when you've start talking about something that they aren't willing to accept. Your life has changed course, and all of a sudden you find yourself out on "the fringe." The people who you once respected and identified with now look at you as "woo-woo" and irrational, if not actually insane.

As someone who works at Sounds True, and as someone who was once, philosophically, a materialist atheist, this story speaks to me very strongly. It is something I want to capture in Sharon's story, since it is the journey that she undergoes when she is blindsided by something miraculous, and it forces her to change her point of view.

In my life, I haven't experienced anything that is obviously miraculous. I'm in the more difficult position of having to decide who to believe when they tell their stories of things that don't fit into the reductionist universe. Oh, to be sure, I've gotten little tastes myself. Yet if I wanted to go back to materialist thinking, I could (unlike Sharon, whose miraculous healing and ongoing immersion into the world of magic give her pretty much no choice but to swallow that she's going to have to change her worldview).

It is a subject that occupies much of my thinking, and I thought Eastwood's handling of the material was superb. If I get the chance, I'll write more about this.