Jennifer E. Smith: The Comeback Season

Title: The Comeback Season
Author: Jennifer E. Smith (http://www.myspace.com/thecomebackseason)
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing
ISBN: 978-1416938477

First off, congratulations on the big novel sale! Give us the elevator pitch. What’s your book about?

It’s basically a love story about two kids who meet at a Cubs game, and the way they teach each other to hope, even when the odds are against them.

Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication. What’s yours? Did you use an agent? Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.

My story is a little bit odd. I wrote a novel my senior year in college, and after I graduated, began querying agents. At the same time, I was looking for jobs in publishing, and was just about to sign with an agent when I got a job as an assistant at a different agency. So I held off, and eventually settled in there instead. Nothing much ever happened with the book, and after awhile my agent suggested trying my hand at a YA novel. I didn’t know much about the genre, and initially dismissed it, but a few weeks later, I was watching the Cubs lose for about the millionth time, and the idea for The Comeback Season popped into my head. It wasn’t even necessarily that I was trying to write for that age group, but the main characters happened to be sixteen, and so everything just sort of fell into place. My agent sent the first sixty pages to a couple of editors, and I remember her calling me down to her office a couple weeks later to show me an email from an editor at S&S saying they loved the book and were planning to make an offer. It took another few weeks before it was all official, but I’ll never forget standing there and realizing it was actually going to happen. I didn’t tell anybody until it was a done deal, since at the time, it seemed almost too good to be true. And in a lot of ways, it still does!

Do you have another book in the pipeline? What are you working on now?

Yes, I’m working on another YA book called You Are Here, about a boy and a girl who come from different backgrounds and seem like opposites, but who get thrown together on a sort of haphazard road trip, and find out they’re a lot more alike than they thought. It’ll be out in Summer 2009, again from Simon & Schuster.

What’s your process like? Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?

Something in between. I used to have to sit down with a big block of time before I could get any real work done, but now that I work as an editor too, I’ve really had to learn how to use pockets of time when I can find them. My schedule is very irregular - I’ll spend an entire weekend on my own writing, and then not have a chance to work on it again for weeks at a time. Sometimes it’s frustrating trying to carve out the time, but I also think the editing I’ve done has helped make me a better writer in some ways. At the very least, it’s certainly made me learn to work faster!

There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership. Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her. If not, tell us what you have against cats.

Nope, no cats for me. I’ve never been much of a cat person. But I do have a four month old beagle puppy named Tate, who seems to be determined to eat everything and anything in my apartment. I adopted him a couple months ago, and though he’s definitely made it a bit harder to sit down and write - he either dangles off my sleeve as I try to type, or else falls asleep with his head on my keyboard - he’s very cute, and great company…at least when he’s not causing trouble!

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