Lara Zielin

The waiting game is hard. I’m currently shifting from one foot to another in the elevator, whistling “The Girl from Impanema,” trying to stay calm. Metaphorically, that is. But really, I’m freaking out all over the place wondering if my queries (all seven of them) have landed in the right places and if they’re piquing the interest of any editors. And no, my query numbers don’t count the one rejection I just got from the Knight Agency and my re-query to Kristin.

One of the ways in which my friend Colleen suggested I improve THE DISAPPEARED was by including more pop culture references — things teens would know about and connect with. I had a few, but here is a partial list of the things I added:

Red Bull
IMs
Text messaging
The Dog Whisperer
Entourage
Ashlee Simpson
iMac
iPod

The drawback to doing this is that it can date the book. 20 years from now people will be like, ha, the Dog Whisperer. But Colleen’s point stands. I might want to write about REM and Madonna, but kids won’t get it. And that defeats the potential success of the book.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 4:05 pm and is filed under friends, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.