SOLD!

After an emotionally taxing month, during which my requests for advice on how to cope with the stress of submission kept being met with suggestions to drink heavily—and, might I add, my protests that I couldn't drink during my workday kept being met with naked derision—I am thrilled to smithereens to announce that my first novel has found a home. NAILING IT, along with a to-be-determined second novel, will be published by Ballantine Books, with the wonderful Kara Cesare editing. Publication dates are still TBD, but look likely to be spring/summer of 2015 and 2016.

So what exactly is it that you've got to look forward to? Well, the book is women’s fiction with a love story at its heart… all set against a backdrop of HGTV-style renovation-porn. It's the story of a female architect too afraid to architect her own happiness, and of all wrong plans we draw up first in our attempts to build—for ourselves—a grown-up sense of home. 

Or, in the words of the deal announcement at Publishers Marketplace,

FICTION
Debut
Brooklyn interior designer Bethany Chase's debut NAILING IT, about a young female architect in Austin, TX, happy in work and love and who thinks she's nailed the blueprint to the perfect life until a heartbreaking old flame waltzes back into town - and hires her to gut renovate his new house, to Kara Cesare at Ballantine, at auction, in a two-book deal, by Meredith Kaffel at DeFiore and Company (World).
Foreign: rkind[at]randomhouse.com
Film/TV: meredith[at]defioreandco.com

And so, in other words, friends... WATCH THIS SPACE!

Design porn - Eamon's house

 Inspiration for Eamon's house

One of those tediously binary "rules" about human nature (you're either right-brained or left-brained; you're either introverted or extroverted) is that, supposedly, people are either visual learners or verbal learners. I call bullshit; I am both. Primarily verbal, perhaps, but if my brain weren't also unavoidably drawn to visual composition and imagery, I'd never have become a quasi-art-major or an interior designer. So even when I'm writing, I think in images.

So naturally, when I was writing this book about a house renovation, I had to find an actual house to write about. Not just that--I pored over the listing photos until I could put together a reasonable facsimile of the existing floor plan, and then I drafted the new plan I wanted to create. And then I furnished it.

I mean, of course I did.

And now I want to show it to you! I promise, if you hang out with me, there will be a lot of photos of gorgeous art and house stuff. And in answer to the question I know is popping up in your mind... no, I have not met a piece of brass I didn't want to make out with. There are worse addictions.

Horchow bed

Hudson Furniture console table

Palo Samko table

detail of the table - those are watch gears embedded in the surface.

Siemon & Salazar pendant light

Homenature bunching side tables

Dowel-leg Eames chairs

Casamidy lounge chair - that's leather wrapped around the frame.

Billy Cotton chandelier

vintage Paulo Mendes da Rocha chair

sigh.

I Haz Agent! Wheeeeeee!!!

the Gato loves spring.

So, friends, it's official: I have accepted representation with the charming and brilliant Meredith Kaffel of DeFiore & Co. Things actually turned out so that I had the extraordinary privilege of receiving offers from three excellent agents, but the nature of the beast demanded that I choose only one, and I am utterly thrilled to be working with Meredith.

It's such a relief to have the agent-hunt process over with. There are a lot of things I'm looking forward to doing again, now that I've unbuckled my seatbelt and stumbled, dizzy, out of my seat on the old query roller coaster:

1. Going for a run outside in the sunshine--I might even do it without sunscreen, seeing as my doctor just discovered I have the vitamin D level of an Icelandic vampire
2. Exercising, period
3. Cooking a real dinner instead of inhaling my usual helping of Chipotle and self-loathing
4. Contributing to cleaning my apartment in a more meaningful way than just placing a wine glass in the dishwasher
5. Being willing to get up early enough to spend a few minutes spackling concealer onto my under-eye circles
6. Buying drinks for all my friends and family who endured two months of my mood veering madly between despondence and euphoria
7. Buying them all MORE drinks... and chocolate, and Valium, and unnecessarily expensive body lotion, to bribe them into continuing to put up with me while the book is out on submission
8. Planning a weekend visit to the location of my second book: a research trip on which my girlfriends *just happen* to be joining me
9. And, of course, pre-submission revisions. But revisions don't stress me out--it's just writing. Making the book even better. Revisions are a bubble massage in a Turkish hammam compared to querying.

So, it's going to be a great spring, and a great summer. Signing with Meredith is certainly more of a first step than a last one, but it's a BIG first one, and I couldn't have gotten here without the support and patience of everybody I love. You know who you are--thank you, and I love you.