A Naked French Man on a White Horse Comes to My Rescue

I’ve just gotten off the phone with my lit agent. The wind has been knocked from my sails. The latest draft of my seven-months-in-the-making-book-proposal, which includes a sample chapter and summaries of all the other chapters, has a lot of problems.

This wasn’t the call I wanted. I’d waited for his notes and edits for many weeks now, imagining the glory — my big, fat head swelling till it got stuck in the door due to the praise — words like genius peppered throughout our chat, along with the promise of my future-best-seller-list-life.

Instead, I felt him throwing his hands up in the air, through the phone. My main character, aka me, is not really that likable, and ultimately, there’s no real point to the book, as I have it now. He didn’t say this, he was much gentler, but it’s what I heard. The worst part is, I agree.

In getting further into the reality of my misshapen book and how I will fix it, he admitted that perhaps the structure I’ve been trying to adhere to could be the wrong di…