Megan McCafferty

Goodbye 00s, Hello…

This was supposed to be a picture of me taken on New Year’s Eve 1999. After much too much time wasted, it turns out that I don’t have any pictures from that night. I’d like to brag all like, oh yeah, that was an EPIC evening of HEDONISTIC EXCESS but the truth is that my husband and I went out to dinner with my parents and my in laws that night and they must have all the pictures because we don’t.

So I’m using this one instead, taken on Toms River around New Year’s Day 1980. I’m six years old. I’m waving goodbye to one decade and hello to the next… (Okay. I’m probably just waving to my dad.)

On December 31st, 1999 I was one month into working from home after quitting my job at the most orgasmic magazine on the planet. Only two weeks earlier an agent enthusiastically agreed to represent me and encouraged me to write the first half of this thing I was too afraid to refer to as a real novel. Six months later, that half manuscript called SLOPPY FIRSTS was sold along with a sequel I had barely conceptualized beyond Jessica Darling’s senior year.

At the very least, I thought, my career as a teen novelist will last until the publication of that second book in  2003… At which point I hoped I’d be resourceful enough to find something else to do with my life should they prove to be colossal failures.

Well, they weren’t.

Thank you for that.

This new decade begins with parallels to the last. I’m half-way through a new manuscript-in-progress and contracted to deliver a second book not long after the first. After five successful novels, I STILL can’t stifle the defensive pessimist in me. At the very least, I think, my career as a teen novelist will last until the publication of that second book in 2013…

I hope to be here ten, twenty, thirty years from now with new manuscripts-in-progress, perpetually miscalculating the years left in my career.

I’ll keep writing if you keep reading,

Megan

P.S. I’m starting a new (retro)blog format for the new decade! Hint: I’ll put my new scanner to good use.

Tags: (retro)blog, sloppy firsts