The Book I Am Writing Now Has an Agent

10/15/2020

I am pleased to announce that my new nonfiction novel exploring midcentury moral panics through flying saucers and the life of movie star James Dean has been picked up by a New York literary agent, who will be representing it to publishers. My agent also represents an Oprah Book Club selection and several award winners. In the coming weeks, we will be working together to sharpen the book proposal for submission to some of the larger publishing houses. Of course, this means that I actually have to stick the landing on this one and bring the story to a satisfying conclusion. Up until now, that was a theoretical concern.

My agent liked my approach, telling the story in novelistic form, using models drawn from midcentury. I’m employing the alternating perspective model and some of the tone and technique of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s pioneering nonfiction novel, for example, though I have restricted myself only to truth, while Capote was much less limited. (I know it’s slightly late for the period I’m covering, but so be it; Capote wrote of the 1950s in 1966, so it’s not unprecedented.) I’m folding in echoes of classic midcentury works like The Haunting of Hill House and Catcher in the Rye and trying my best to confine my language to the words used in the 1950s. Fortunately, when I was young, I read all the midcentury classics, and a lot of the trash, too. My parents had their old books from their younger years, and I picked up stacks of paperbacks from books sales for a quarter or a dime apiece back in the day, so the idiom comes naturally. Come to think of it, perhaps I shouldn’t have been reading Tropic of Cancer or A Clockwork Orange when I was twelve or thirteen, but the past is the past.

So, I am excited that my work has representation and eager for it to have the widest possible audience.

31 Comments

An Anonymous Nerd

10/15/2020 02:45:37 pm

Nice job on the agent.

[words used in the 1950s]

So I'm sure not at all like this:

[Don't be such a square! Come out to the malt shop and get some banana splits! After that we'll listen to some of my mom's race records, then race some stolen cars off of a cliff!]

Be sure to throw in some badly-done Ancient Norse runes then send a PDF of the book to Scott Wolter.

Jason Colavito link

10/15/2020 03:44:59 pm

God, no. I mean that I am trying to avoid a jarring disconnect between my language and that of the period and the people. For example, I once read a book about Roman history, and it started to slip into Bush-era terminology about "shock and awe" and other buzzwords, and it took me out of the narrative entirely. I want, as much as possible, to avoid that.

Nerd11135 (DAMN IT! I FORGOT MY REBRANDING EARLIER!!!)

10/15/2020 04:44:18 pm

But wouldn't it be fun if James Dead suddenly whipped out his smart phone and texted Vampira to say "l0l, as if, b1tch!"

Jim

10/15/2020 04:59:11 pm

Groovy

Nerd11135

10/15/2020 07:52:27 pm

[Groovy]

It's also swell! And keen!

I also have to admit that my "James Dead" was just a typo of "Dean." I'm not beat enough to be so naughtily ironic on purpose.

10/15/2020 03:21:40 pm

Things are looking up,,,good luck.

Brian

10/15/2020 06:29:32 pm

Congratulations! I only hope you have a lot more luck with your agent than I had with mine. (Sad story - cue tears.)

Doc rock

10/15/2020 10:47:28 pm

To quote the Hannibal character from the series The A Team, I love it when a plan comes together. Carry on, with my best wishes for success

orang

10/15/2020 11:36:54 pm

Peachy keen neato torpedo and hunky dory chicken cacciatore. Far out and solid too.

Anthony G.

10/16/2020 02:01:20 am

Does hiring an agent violate NCAA rules where you're no longer eligible for a University Press?

Ha!

T. Franke link

10/16/2020 04:45:24 am

Congratulations. This may be an important step towards monetarizing your talents in an appropriate way. Good work is worth good money. Your agent knows this.

It would be interesting to hear more about your experiences working with an agent. How did the connection come into place? He "picked up" your book?

I know the experience to have read the wrong books when I was young. But it is not true. Everybody has to start somewhere. Our reading career is as unique as our whole biography. Life is by its nature a journey of exploration and discovery, so we always know better in hindsight. And maybe we even discover after some time that there is more to our first readings than many think. We can see this better than others because we read these books more intensely.

10/16/2020 10:01:55 pm

I'm merely being idiomatic. I sent a book proposal and sample chapters to the agent. He read it. He told me he would represent it.

I didn't read "wrong" books in that they were damaging. "Tropic of Cancer" was banned in the United States for 30 years because of its sexually explicit content. I merely meant that someone probably ought to have been thinking about the books I was reading. They weren't really appropriate for kids.

Nick Danger

10/16/2020 09:23:02 am

I'm looking forward to reading the finished product, Mr. Colavito!

E,P, Grondine

10/16/2020 12:22:43 pm

So let's see:

Instead odf writr5ing a nice sunny piece about young Brando, young Dean, young Mineo and luscious Vampira, we're now going to get aome profound reflection piece on the late forites early fifities, Perhaps you could just set that other material off in a separate research file, so at least some one can make some money.

By the way, hasn't anyone ever told you about discussing a work in progress?

10/16/2020 10:05:21 pm

There are already books discussing James Dean's celebrity interactions in the last year of his life. There's a whole volume just on the two months of making "Rebel without a Cause" and another on the couple of months of making "Giant." My book might be profound, but it's a nonfiction novel. It tells a story, and for better or worse real life dictates that this story is a tragedy.

E.P. Grondine

10/18/2020 06:24:11 pm

Well, Jason, there are a lot of young actors too, and sunny afternoons in LA. All I can say for now is good luck.

While i was doing serious work I had a lot of minor distractions I has to write out just to clear the deck. They have a senior writers
aid groupd, and I hope to head to the beach and try to flog them sometime late next year. I suppose you will get a pesos from me for a copy of your next effort

Not Kent

10/16/2020 02:50:21 pm

"Come to think of it, perhaps I shouldn’t have been reading Tropic of Cancer or A Clockwork Orange when I was twelve or thirteen, but the past is the past."

Ah, Man, that's really funny, Jason!

I was in the same boat. How about Shea & Wilson's "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" @ 10-11?

Shit happens.

You're going to nail it! Great news!

😅

10/19/2020 11:41:32 am

max

10/17/2020 01:21:59 pm

Congrats! Given the tone and content of previous blog posts about your difficulties getting traction, and your frustration with being boxed into Ancient Aliens, this must come as both a relief and a joy.

(But Oprah book club? She promotes so much woo...)

Kent

10/17/2020 10:47:51 pm

(But Oprah book club? She sells so many books...)

FIFY.

10/18/2020 11:41:55 pm

You, Sir?

Are The Man.

Thanks for sounding up, and checking in.

Much Love,

Not You.

10/19/2020 02:42:47 pm

Amazingly Kent, I’m pretty sure I meant what I said when I said it. Oprah is well known to promote plenty of made up crap.

But thank you for assuming you can read my mind and tell me what I actually think or meant to say.

10/19/2020 10:52:38 pm

Wow. Keeping obtusity alive I guess. Sad.

Suzanne link

10/18/2020 10:25:51 am

Go Jason! Go Jason! Best of luck to you!

Charles Verrastro link

10/18/2020 02:15:05 pm

Mazel Tov, Jason.

Sympathize with you about lack of parental or other supervision for impressionable children's reading. By the age of three on I was reading material with questionable content. Weird SF stuff about dead people retuning from the grave, people masturbating in fields, gruesome S&M and bondage stuff, Genocide, Dystopian & End-of-the-World fantasies, etc.
Oh, wait that was just the one book. My folks carelessly left the family Bible out where anyone could read it.

Tom M

10/20/2020 07:05:39 pm

More than actual language or tone of the book. I would hope it’s not written in the lens of revisionist history. It’s easy to look back 70 years ago and be critical of that period of time. In my estimation, It’s low hanging fruit to be overly critical of the Red Scare and military authority in 1950’s America when you consider the 20 million who died in WWl and the 80 million deaths in WWll. There was a need for the military not only to defeat a common enemy but also to provide structure to rebuild Europe. Yes, McCarthyism did exist. But you have to take into consideration the context of those times and that we weren’t the only one with the atomic bomb. After two devastating world wars both within roughly 30 years. It was a flawed time to be sure. For me, James Dean was as flawed an individual as the times in which he lived. But he, along with many others, began to push the boundaries of what was acceptable male behavior. Have things progressed as quickly as we’d like? No. Still it’s better now than it was 70 years ago. And I suspect it will be even better 70 years from now than it is today.

10/21/2020 01:41:16 pm

Good God Magnum! "McCarthyism" existed because high level infiltration of the State Department, etc, by Soviet spies existed. Harry Hopkins lived in the effing White House. But we mayn't talk about that, must we?

Darold knowles

10/22/2020 03:57:34 pm

You might want to cut back on the weed wax.

Helen Keller the Pinko Spy

10/23/2020 12:33:46 pm

The Harry Hopkins as highly placed Soviet spy conspiracy theory makes a lot of sense if you take your breakfast bagel with a generous schmear of weed wax.

10/24/2020 08:05:32 pm

Inspiration.

A 1956 Sears catalogue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aWpnGrX6Nc