I got a lovely call from my agent the other day. We had both assumed my first book was dead on arrival. Apparently, however, the book had been passed from some executive editor at Harper Collins to his assistant who read it and … loved it! The assistant had called my agent to tell her he was going to try to get approval from the board to publish the book as a trade paperback original. Crap!

Four times in this process I’ve been given tangible hope that something good was going to happen. My agent had a close friend who she thought would be very interested, a senior editor absolutely loved everything she’d read so far, an executive editor wanted a second read, a publisher really liked the book and was trying to decide if he wanted to bid. Each time, the result has been the same…I get really excited and hopeful such that I have trouble sleeping some nights and I check my email 4.2 billion times a day. I daydream constantly of what I’m going to tell my family, particularly those who’ve always disapproved of my reckless decision to be an author. I work on my marketing plan. And then…flomp…the great belly-flop into the concrete bottom of the empty pool that is rejection.

So…this time, I will do my best to not get too excited. I’ll focus my mind on things I have some control over, like my next book and my annoying job. I’ll check my email only 4.19 billion times a day. I’ll prepare for the fantastic Jeffrey Deaver seminar this weekend (and by the way, if you’re not planning to attend, but you can, you definitely should–it’s going to be great–see my previous blog entry for more info). Now, if only it wasn’t so hard to type with my fingers crossed…

My two-year old sometimes has trouble pronouncing the “s” at the beginning of words. She also inhabits a very elaborate fantasy world where she and those close to her are assigned the roles of characters from her favorite books, TV shows and movies. While this is generally pretty cute, it also produces quite a bit of anxiety around our house. On the one hand, I worry that I rely on the electronic babysitter too much and am therefore a bad parent. On the other, I really, really want the good roles.

When Callie started to be Dora the Explorer, I was very excited because I got to be her super-cool animal-adventurer cousin Diego. (My wife became Boots the Monkey (Dora’s best friend) and our new baby Wyllie, for a reason I’m not clear on, became Abuela (Dora’s grandmother)).  Unfortunately, Diego has his own show and Callie soon wanted to be him too. This led to a very significant and troubling career change for me as I was demoted to Swiper the Sneaky Fox. Jen, of course, got to stay Boots the lovable monkey.

I scored a major coup, however, when Callie decided her little red jacket made her into Little Red Riding Hood. I became Mr. Whittle the Heroic Woodcutter, Wyllie became the Grandmother (typecasting’s a killer in this business) and Jen became the Wolf. Ha ha. Take that, Boots.

When Callie started showing signs of interest in Mulan, I immediately started lobbying for the role of the Heroic Captain Li, with such subtle enticements as “If you’re Mulan, maybe I could be Captain Li and maybe you could have an extra cookie.” This left Jen as Mushu, the Eddie Murphy-voiced dragonlet. Another victory. Unfortunately, Callie took the cookie and forgot our arrangement. Soon enough, I became the Big Dragon. This is not nearly as cool as it sounds. The Big Dragon has about two minutes of screen time, mostly consisting of him crumbling to dust when Mushu tries to wake him up. Blast it!

But today’s diascribe is not really about the politics of fictional-character assignments in my home. As I mentioned earlier, my daughter Callie has trouble with “s.” This means that when she becomes Scooby Doo (or rather, ‘cooby doo) and I become Shaggy, and Jen becomes Velma, and our dog Zaida becomes Fred, and our dog Turtle becomes Daphne, baby Wyllie–showing serious range–becomes Scooby Doo’s nephew, that spunky little pugilist: Crappy Doo.

My point is–and yes I have one–that very subtle differences can make very big impacts in the world of language. For the last few days I’ve been preparing for a workshop I’ll be co-leading this weekend with the incredible Chris Mandeville. We’re opening for Jeffery Deaver who will be conducting a seminar about writing commercial fiction. Deaver is a bestselling author of thrillers and mysteries who, unlike many of his peers, manages to write very successfully in numerous sub-genres of his category.

To begin the workshop, I will be leading an analysis of the first pages of four of Deaver’s books. What has amazed me in my preparation is how perfectly Deaver sets up tension from his very first words and does so in a style that’s elegantly consistent with his sub-genre. He achieves his effect, among other things, through exceedingly fine-tuned word choices. For example, consider the second line of Deaver’s book The Blue Nowhere: “Lara Gibson sat at the bar of Vesta’s Grill on De Anza in Cupertino, California, gripping the cold stem of her martini glass and ignoring the two young chip-jocks standing nearby, casting flirtatious glances at her.” Let’s analyze, shall we?

First, the name: “Lara Gibson.” I may be reading too much into Deaver’s thinking here, but “Lara” is the first name of the ultimate techno dreamgirl Lara Croft and “Gibson” is the last name of the greatest hero of cyberpunk, writer William Gibson. Whether intentionally (as I suspect) or unintentionally, Deaver has created the perfect name for an intelligent and attractive woman in the milieu of the techno-thriller.

Next, the location: a bar on De Anza in Cupertino, California. We will later learn this spot is directly across the street from the headquarters of Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems, and thus a perfect place to kick off a book about computers, high intrigue, and murder.

Then comes my favorite part of the sentence: “gripping the cold stem of her martini glass.” When my college writing professor lectured about salient details, he couldn’t have picked a better exemplar than this. Our cyberbabe (whose attractiveness is confirmed in the final part of the sentence by the flirtatious chip-jocks) is not just holding or touching her  glass, she’s gripping it. This single word gives us desperation, fear, and when you note that she’s gripping the mere stem of a glass, small comfort. If I were in the mood for gripping, I’d much rather be gripping something significant, something mortared to the steadfast earth. But the stem of a glass…? Inwardly, subconsciously, I cringe, imagining that delicate stem snapping in Lara Gibson’s tight-fisted grip. And, of course, it’s not any old glass in Lara’s hand. It’s a martini glass. So, we now know our heroine’s drink of choice and it confirms her stature as a suave cyberbabe, otherwise at home in this fancy Silicon Valley grill. Finally, showing how a single, tiny adjective can dramatically enhance the mood of a sentence…we get that the tightly gripped stem of the martini glass is “cold.” Perfection.

A decade ago in the California desert, I had the opportunity to go horseback riding with my uncle. He gave me a choice between a very passive older horse who didn’t much like to run and Sneaky Snip, an ornery former race horse who’d been abused in his racing days and, as a result, was now “a bit unstable.” With all the confidence of a 21-year-old convinced of his infallibility, I chose the latter, not bothering to ask what exactly “a bit unstable” meant.

Having ridden horses fairly extensively during my tenth grade year, I considered myself quite a horseman. I knew, for example, to always keep the ball of my foot in the stirrup (rather than the back of the foot, because if you get your foot hooked in the stirrup and then get thrown, you’ll end up with at least one broken bone if not several). I knew that riding is all about your legs and the reins; hanging onto the saddle with your hands when a horse takes off not only surrenders control but can also potentially loosen or shift the saddle (not a good thing). Finally, I knew to be extra careful when heading back toward the stables, since horses like to get home quickly when they know they’re on their way.

The ride started off fine. We made our way through some brush-covered hills and then galloped for a while down a long sandy wash. On the way back, cocky about how well I’d done with the infamous Mr. Snip, I took the lead on a particularly narrow and treacherous stretch, one that skirted a ridge with a steep drop on the right. On the left there was a rocky, cactus-, scorpion- and rattlesnake-filled deathyard.  The sun blazed overhead. The wind stilled. Just as we were passing the vultures perched on a pile of human skulls…(okay, okay, I’m exaggerating a bit–there was actually a slight breeze)…Sneaky Snip took off. Bucking wildly, he darted through the deathyard, trying his damnedest to get me off so he could enjoy the rest of his trip home. I dropped the reins and grabbed the pommel of the saddle like a fundamentalist grabbing her Bible at a nudist, gay Wicca convention. My left foot lost its stirrup while my right foot got tangled in the other. I took a moment to wonder whether it would hurt more to have my leg broken or my head crushed and whether there was such a thing as being drawn and halved. I also noted, with a wee bit of concern, that I was no longer in the seat of my saddle, but rather sitting on the horse’s rear end. This made the bucking action even more…well…fun. Indeed, for the flicker of a second between flashes of my coming doom, I realized I was having fun. That’s about the time Sneaky Snip stopped bucking, slowed to a bumpy trot and then, just like that, stopped.

For the last two months, between caring for the brand new baby, struggling with a massive escalation in work load at my job, taking the GRE, GMAT, and LSAT back-to-back, getting sicker than a plague monkey with irritable bowel syndrome and a head cold, and volunteering as a precinct captain for Obama–I’ve felt a bit like I was back on that horse’s ass being bounced toward oblivion. And yet–with 99th percentile scores on the tests, a blowout for Obama (he got 8 of 8 delegates in my precinct), and watching my newest daughter learn to smile–I have to admit the last month’s been perhaps even more fun than that ride from hell. Of course, I’ve mentioned nothing about my writing.

How’s that going, you ask? The short answer: about as well as Hillary did in precinct 747 last night inasmuch as I’ve produced bupkus. The long answer: tomorrow, I’ll be sufficiently caught up on work to take a couple of hours in the morning to write. Perhaps Friday will give me a couple of hours as well. And heck, my tests are done, grad school applications are the better part of a year away, and my new assignment as a delegate for Obama and Congressman Udall doesn’t require anything from me until March 8th.

Eventually, miraculously, if you hang on long enough…the horse stops.