Agent Season

I've been a professional screenwriter for a little over ten years now. In that time I've had three agents and one manager, a not-unusual rate of attrition for this business. The first agent I fired, the second one quit agenting to pursue a career in development, and the third quit agenting a month before I was planning on firing him. The manager I kept, but she's in Los Angeles, and I'm not. I think this makes her a little sad sometimes.

2007 was already shaping up to be a year of great change -- all for the better -- even before I found out (on January 2nd, no less) that I had a baby daughter on the way. That trend continued today when, following a link from crafty screenwriter Alex Epstein's blog, I wound up cold-calling a local literary agency, The Alpern Group, that dealt with both Canadian and US markets (a very important consideration for me).

Now, understand, cold call contacts are the part of being a freelance writer (freelance anything, really) that I'm really bad at. Brad, my former writing partner, really excelled at that sort of thing. Me, I make all my professional acquaintances at parties, at conventions, through friends and colleagues; sometimes they even call me out of the blue. Me calling other people out of the blue? Not so much. Frankly, I suck at it. I get nervous. I stammer. I sound like an idiot in front of people I'm trying to impress. It's not pretty. I think there's some deeply insecure part of myself that feels like I'm bothering them or something.

But cold call I did, after business hours, and left a brief (and relatively idiocy-free) message for Elana Trainoff, the point person there. For obvious reasons, I didn't expect to get a reply until tomorrow at the earliest, if at all (there's that insecurity again). Imagine my groove-is-in-the-heart dee-lite when Elana calls me back a half-hour later. "Just an example of what a hard-working agency we are," she said. I like that. A lot.

Anyway, I've sent Elana my curriculum vitae, and if she likes what she sees (or, at the very least, isn't scared off by what she sees), she'll want to see some writing samples. From there, who knows? But her agency specializes in television, which is a market I really want to crack this year.

The best part of this story is, of course, that I discovered The Alpern Group's Toronto office is literally a block from my apartment. A block! What are the odds?

j!