Being Invited to the Prom - for the First Time

I never went to a prom. I wasn't even aware that my high school had them. I suppose they must have, although the fact that our town was constructed with the sole purpose of helping build the atom bomb meant my classes were filled with a disproportionate number of scientists' children. (I am assiduously avoiding the word egghead.)

But the concept of a prom was simply outside my world, as was attending a football game or pep rally. If any of my friends went to a prom, they never talked about it, and I skipped my senior year to go to university early. And when I wasn't living and breathing bicycle racing I had my nose in a book, and likely would have considered the entire prospect of a prom with the combination of horror and disdain you reserve for things you know are outside the realm of your life options. People in my world did not get asked to proms.

But now suddenly, I have. Suddenly I'm not on the outside looking in. Suddenly I am smack in the middle of a life I had only begun to vaguely dream of.

I've been asked to the prom, and not by one party, but by two: Two publishers wanted to buy my novel, LEARNING TO SWIM.

Which meant I had to decide between them.

Yes, it's a good problem to have, but I agonized over it, as I likely would have back in high school if two mythical males had asked me to the prom I supposed we had. The vagaries of fate meant that I was making my wrenching decision in a hotel room far from home, while in the background, The Bachelorette's Gillian was pretending to try to choose between the two - no, oops, three - men she was considering. And as she did, I parsed and compared and analyzed and consulted and weighed and tried to figure out which of my needs and inclinations were visceral and real and which were purely emotional.

Then, long after midnight, I made up my mind. For the second time in my life - the first being back in May when I decided to disregard one agent's tepid response and suggestion to drastically cut the opening chapters of my novel, and proceeded to query a bevy of top agents - I simply trusted my gut.

And woke up the next morning knowing that I had an entirely new future ahead of me.

Life after the prom. I'm looking forward to it.

Details: I have committed to a two-book deal with editor John Glusman at Shaye Areheart Books/Crown. The first novel, LEARNING TO SWIM, will be published in hardback in Fall 2010.