Noah, leaping for a ball!
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We’ve written about our dog park before, usually in relation to U.S. politics. Well, this entry is entirely different. Just books and authors and, of course, dogs.
When Nika was younger, we used to take her and Noah into a part of the park intended for smaller dogs. Here, they played Frisbee and catch the ball with Lily, a funny, very focused pug (that’s her to the left of Noah), and Willow, a border collie, whose partial body and tail are visible in the photo. One afternoon, we dog people stood around and talked about stocks with Ralph, who was once a broker on Wall Street, and Cassie, who owns Willow and tends someone’s horses.
Cassie is one of those women whose presence tells you she considers her dog, Willow, and maybe all dogs and animals, as a lot of notches above humans. She’s originally from New Jersey, and is a skilled horse person who has made horses her profession. Here where we live, she tends four horses that belong to a wealthy person, that’s’ all we know about her.
This area was built with equestrians in mind. They compete, they play polo, they are pro jumpers and Olympian trainers. Tommy Lee Jones owns a home here – and his own polo team. Bruce Springsteen lives here part-time because his daughter is an equestrian jumper. For a while, Madonna rented a place and so did Bill Gates. I don’t know if either of them are equestrians, but it was rumored that the chopper we saw flying in over the Aero Club every afternoon belonged to Gates, who had rented a house here for the winter. But until this particular afternoon, I didn’t know that a famous writer also lives here.
“We’re staying here this summer because my boss has another book to write,” Cassie said.
My antenna twitched. “Your boss is a writer? Of what?”
Cassie looked embarrassed. “Hell if I know. I’ve never read any of her books.”
“What genre?” I asked. “Does she write romance, science fiction, suspense, paranormal, women’s fiction, or what?”
Cassie frowned. “Mystery and suspense, I guess.”
“What’s her name?”
“Tami Hoag.”
I nearly swallowed my tongue. Tami Hoag, like Stephen King, shines in her field. Her writing is tight, her plots are complex, her characters are people we like. “I would love to get a blurb for her for my next book, Ghost Key.” I blurt this and am, frankly, shocked and embarrassed. Never, in thirty years of writing, have I ever been so forward, blunt, and grossly obvious. And Cassie, gem that she is, tells me to drop her an email and she’ll forward it to Tami.
So I do. And I tell my friend, writer Ed Gorman, about it and he jokingly says that he would have held Cassie hostage until Tami had to ride to her rescue and give your book a blurb. Ed isn’t kidding and that speaks volumes about the value of a blurb from someone like Tami Hoag.
Stephen King gave The Hunger Games a glowing blurb, and that book went on to become a NYT bestseller and an enormously profitable film. Of course, it helps that the trilogy deserves accolades.
What’s interesting about Hoag is that she’s also an Olympic competitor. That’s part of the reason she employs Cassie. And being a competitor at that level obviously means you’re serious about what you do. I emailed my request, then later gave Cassie a galley of the book. A few days later, she came over to me at the dog park and says, “Okay, I gave Tami the galley you gave me and if she doesn’t blurb it I’ll kill her.”
Not long after, she reported that Tami looked at the galley then gestured at the pile of books next to her desk. “You see this? These are all the books my publisher asked me to blurb. I can’t read one more book. I’ve go to finish the book I’m writing.”
What I took away from this whole thing is pretty simple: writers who are now in the upper one or two percent were once in the lower one or two percent. They are under tremendous pressure to produce something new because these writers are the ones who probably sustain the publishing industry and pay the salaries of the editors who give manuscripts a thumbs up or thumbs down.
I heard a story, maybe a writers’ urban legend, that when Stephen King visited the office of NAL (Signet, Penguin, lots of imprints) he moved up and down the hall, pointing at this editor, that editor. “I pay your salary and yours and yours…” And this image of King, a master story teller, made me laugh so hard my ribs actually hurt. It’s not even funny. But I can envision King doing that.
The other detail I took away from this experience is that Cassie, Tami Hoag’s horse whisperer, is a really cool woman who understands horses and dogs in ways the rest of us don’t. When we see her in the afternoons at the dog park, she and Willow, are playing with the blue ball that is the center of his existence right then, in the NOW, and I am reminded that my life isn’t just about writing and publishing. Writers write, artists paint, musicians create, singers sing, actors act, we all have some creative compulsion that drives us. But it’s never the sum total of who they are.
(from soul cards)
