Undo | Page 5

Padwa, whose keen suggestions helped me to make the book a better read. There was even a glossy lavender and gold embossed book jacket with my photo on back atop Digby Diehl's encouraging blurb, and two months before the publication date I received my first bound galley copy, to double-check for typesetting errors before it went off to the printer. The prepublication buzz started up, and a Hollywood producer named Andrew Karsch, who'd just released "The Prince of Tides" with Barbra Streisand, was considering buying a film option on the novel to adapt for a possible a feature film or television miniseries. And just when things couldn't possibly look brighter, they did, when both Kirkus Review and Publishers Weekly asked to see advance reader's copies of the book.
And then the impossible dream turned into a nightmare. I should have known the end was near when instead of receiving the signing advance in one lump sum, as agreed upon, it was coming in smaller and smaller portions (and then only after my hounding the accounting department every day telling them my rent and phone bill were late). You see, I wanted to believe. It was difficult enough to accept that this was finally happening to me - that my first novel was about to be published in hardback to building fanfare. To think otherwise, that something might stop the novel from being published, wasn't a "happy thought," and anything but happy thoughts, my agent advised, would seep disagreeably into the novel's successful launch. But unhappy did things turn when Knightsbridge announced that it was closing shop.
But I was not to be put off. Armed with ten bound galleys, my agent appealed to several hardback publishers...and when they all said no - in almost every case for the same reasons Brian Tart at Bantam gave us - we tried paperback publishers, lowering our expectations and hoping then for a paperback original deal. Twice we came close. First Ace, then Berkley, however editors at both houses met resistance from editorial boards who felt that the novel would find no audience.
Feeling dejected and down on my luck, I had to blame someone for this conspiracy, so once again I contacted my agent and told her I would be seeking representation elsewhere. This time she told me she wouldn't take me back if I changed my mind, and who could blame her. My next agent, who'd left an old and very successful New York literary agency to start her own agency, was young and fresh and building a name for herself as one to watch in the business, with editors chasing her all over the floor at the first American Booksellers Association conference she attended on her own. She had a more focused approach: Talk up the book to a few editors she knew very well and try to get something of a rivalry going for it - before any of them even read it. Brilliant thinking; this was the kind of agent I wanted on my side. Shooting for freshness, we decided to change the novel's title from "Silicon Dreams" to "Double Click," and off it went to the waiting editors. The long and short of it: Neither Random House nor Viking wanted it. Adding insult to injury, one even suggested that if I were to write a non-fiction book he would publish that. What a depressing thought.
Before she'd signed me up, my agent and I had agreed to treat our relationship as a trial agreement. After the rejection, I decided that though she was fast becoming a very hot agent, mainstream fiction wasn't her area of expertise; what I really, really needed was an agent who represented best-selling mainstream authors.
My friend Gloria Nagy, a splendid novelist with seven novels under her belt (one of which, "Looking for Leo," is on its way to becoming a CBS miniseries), put me in touch with her then-agent, Ed Victor, who is based in London, and enjoys a long client list of acclaimed literary and mainstream authors. After Gloria's introduction, I sent my novel to Ed Victor, and although he'd rejected the novel six years ago, suggesting it needed a lot of work (advise I took to heart), this time he responded positively, saying he had enjoyed it.
Yet, because his client list was so full and active, he was at the time not taking on new fiction writers. He did however direct me to an agent named Juliet Nicolson, with whom he had begun a working alliance, and to whom he would be happy to send my novel for consideration. A spirited British woman, Juliet had lived and worked in publishing in the United States for many years, and had decided to return to London to start her own agency. Several weeks later she faxed me to