Today, I signed a contract with Paula Balzer of the Paula Balzer Agency to represent my humorous nonfiction book G3, MR. WICKER and whatever else I write for the forseeable future. Paula just left Lazin Books, where she was an agent for a number of years. She’s sold dozens of books, mostly nonfiction, but also dark fiction and thrillers. She’s super smart, funny and a really great person who lives in the 21st century (a rarity for the publishing industry). She said all the exact same glowing things about my writing that the Curtis Brown agent said, but loves Mr. Wicker enough to get him out there. I hope it works out for us both!

Our first order of business was to put the G3 proposal into a format that was more standard: taking the “overview” that I wrote and turning it into chapter summaries, then writing a more general introduction with a little biographical info. She gave me sample proposals from two other books she’s sold to use as guidelines. I hammered out something for her on Sunday as I was recovering from my poopy Saturday. We want to get that together ASAP so that she can send it out. She seems confident it’ll sell and soon, and I share that optimism. The project is very commercial. I’m hoping it will help finance my wayward lifestyle in Aix.

She’s going to re-read MR. WICKER and give me some notes on it. Primarily, she says it needs to be polished in places where the tone becomes dodgy. I’m not sure exactly what she’s referring to, but I deeply suspect she’s picking up on artifacts from the script-to-book adaptation. She loves the plot, characters, everything else. The bad news is that we might be working on this while I’m at Middlebury, which means I’ll have to break the French Only pledge. This being my life’s passion and all that, I’m not going to sweat it.

In more good news, The Frenchman signed the papers to sell his house last night. He kissed my head and said, “I have to keep my Minou in corsets while we’re away.” I’m not that high maintenance, am I? (Don’t answer that.)