Rocky Mountain High

You could say I've been quite high the last few days.

Emotionally, it's because (and this is the secret I was waiting to reveal!) I signed with literary agent, Lisa Hagan, president of Paraview, Inc., to represent my Easy World book, and any other books I write! It's been said that getting an agent is, perhaps, more challenging even than getting a publisher. I don't know about that (I hope that's true since it was so easy for me!), but you can't submit your work to most major publishers without having an agent. I had extraordinarily good fortune in that Lisa is only the 2nd one I submitted my query to--and the first one recently (the last was in December). The other guy would have been totally wrong to represent a book about Easy World, anyway, and I credit Easy World with the ease with which I connected with Lisa!

I'll tell you more about Lisa in the coming days, but I'll hit the highlights now. She's very successful--she's been at it for 18 years and has sold a slew of books--and everything I read about her says that she's wonderful to work with. She is now in Virginia, but was in NYC for many years and moved back home--says she went home one Thanksgiving and didn't want to go back to the city--so she didn't. We talked on the phone this week and got along famously--she is very spiritual-growth inclined and we speak the same basic language in that regard. She's excited about my book and, most importantly, "gets" Easy World, which is a requirement!

She said my 71-page proposal (including sample chapters) was excellent, which was a huge relief after devoting so much time to it and only having some books to go by. She only suggested a minor format change in one section, and I decided to tweak a couple of others, so I polished it up and sent her the final version today. Apparently, summertime in the publishing world is very slow since so many people are on vacation and editorial meetings are scarce, so she advised me to be prepared for that. That's okay. I've turned this over to Easy World and I will simply occupy myself doing whatever I'm inspired to do and know that it's all being handled in EW!

The physical "high" came yesterday when Rick and I went on a day trip to the mountains. We drove the Mt. Evans Scenic Byway, the highest paved road in North America (ascends to14,240 feet), open only approx. 3 months out of the year. Once you see the road, you'll understand why!  This movie is of part of our descent from Mt. Evans--pay particular notice to the edge of the asphalt pavement, and know that there were huge "bites" out of the edge in some places--SCARY! I had the "help me Jesus!" grab bar above the passenger-side door in a death grip much of the time, letting go of it only to video the experience to share with you. The wind noise is pretty loud so you may want to turn down the volume, but if you listen to the audio, you'll probably laugh at what I say right before the video ends...

First, however, some dramatic still shots from the top of the world, taken by Rick (click on the thumbnail for a large-format view):

I'll have to finish this entry later with a Part 2. This is enough for now!