Snow! Ice! Madness and mayhem! 

A-P-O-C-A-L-Y-P-S-E!

Welcome to the past 10 days in Washington DC/Northern Virginia. A land of snowbanks four feet high, whipping whiteout winds, strange gnarly icicles hanging like sharpened troll’s teeth. And the slow sliding trudge back and forth down skating-rink streets where only the sound of snowblowers breaks the silence.

It’s been a strange old time, I can tell you.  And even stranger if you’re a British émigré, used to cries of ARMAGEDDON over nothing more than one inch of the white stuff. Face pressed against the glass I watched as inexorably it rose – 12 inches, 20 inches, 26 inches, 32 inches; a brief respite then 11 inches more. . . .  Like a white invader – snapping the pole of our housemartin residence, trickling into the walls with ominous sibilance, sliced like a two-foot shining wedding cake along the driveway. Outside, the modest crossroads have become the mountains of the moon – our very own Alaska. And somewhere in the whiteness you’ll find Wee Man [see earlier posts], hurling his curly ice-balled self into snowdrifts, as plucky and up-for-it as a deranged (and miniature) husky.

So a lot of work has been done in the past 10 days – the rush from desk to window, Kindle to shovel, camera to pencil – as I’ve snowplowed my way through manuscript critiques for Asilomar, against-the-clock edits on several manuscripts (I never like to keep expectant authors waiting long), speech preparation, submissions, reading, finance bits and bobs, another about-to-be-confirmed German deal - and much more.  Do you want to know how hard agents work? Well, I’d better not mention the hours that are standard for me, but you can probably take a guess. Nothing comes from nothing in this business and if you want to make a mark, you can expect to work like a dog (no offence to the Wee Man).

I’ve also been thinking about communication during this period. I’m terrible at being shut in; I’m a chatty/mingling/convivial kind of person, and having my way barred by roads my Mini can’t traverse is profoundly frustrating. I get cross, I get antsy, I want to bust out.  So I’ve been profoundly grateful for the companionship of the internet and all its sociable delights and distractions.

One of the questions people always ask at conferences and in interviews is: how important is social networking, blogging, tweeting etc?  Is it vital to a new writer? Should I have a web presence? WHAT SHOULD I BE DOING AND AM I NOT DOING SOMETHING I SHOULD BE DOING AND AM I THEREFORE DOOOOOMED???

What I want to say is . . . . calm down. As Dame Julian of Norwich (an English medieval mystic lady) said, ‘All things will be well.’ And it’s true.  If you have a great concept, if you write strongly and with passion, if you have a grasp of structure, character and pace . . . . then an agent on red alert will find you, whether or not your name has ever appeared in cyberspace. It’s true that not every agent will feel a conviction about your work (unless you’re one of the few), it’s true that some will miss you because they couldn’t get there in time, but if you approach submission with thoughtful diligence you will make it, tweet or no tweet.

My personal view is that until you have a deal it doesn’t matter too much whether you have a website or not, though I know some may disagree with that and it does depend on a) how great the site is b) how gifted a self-promoter you are and c) whether you’re prepared to invest time, care and money before you have any guarantee of an actual audience. There are some benefits to NOT having an online presence before you have the deal - because post deal you can exactly target your site to the correct audience, rather than doing a tricky about shift from addressing your peer-group writers to addressing an actual readership of kids. And that’s something important to bear in mind – your readers/visitors are going to be completely different after the deal than before.  After the deal you want a colourful, fun, informative, possibly interactive site that will lure young people who’ve enjoyed your book – plus you can use it to post school visits, new books, interviews/reviews, etc etc.

I think the online mantra should always be: Who is my audience? Am I catering to that audience as well as I possibly can?

I guess I’m ambivalent about social networking.  Basically, if you’re a published author (or soon to be published), anything that builds your fanbase is a good idea and strongly recommended. And, of course, it’s good to be savvy and informed about the industry you aspire to join. However, I’m not sure there is necessarily huge pre-deal promotional worth in Facebooking, tweeting, blogging et al – it’s fun, it’s useful if you get widely picked up/followed/read, but reading posts by an aspiring author has never changed my decision about taking someone on as a client. 

For me, it all comes down to the writing because that’s where the rubber hits the road.  I want authors who first and foremost work energetically on their craft, glory in language, take joy in a fabulous story well told.  The rest – the promotional stuff – can be put in place after we get you a deal.

I always look at links that writers include in queries – they can be very interesting and revealing. In a blog-filled world I love to see writing that is fresh, funny, moving or just plain interesting; writing that complements your fiction skills and underscores just how standout you really are. Again, it wouldn’t change my decision about you, but be wary of enumerating your rejections, documenting the endless struggle – you are out there in cyberspace for posterity, and any agent or editor you query is almost certainly going to drop in if you include a link. Is this the face you most want to present?

You know what? I don’t tweet. I blog because I love to write, and because I want to tell you a bit about what lies behind Greenhouse. But everything I really want to say requires a lot more words than the hiccup of a tweet. Julia tweets useful tips and quotes from this site (look left!), but she and I have always been very clear that Greenhouse tweeting should give you inspirational good value – a word of wisdom; a writerly ‘thought for the day’.  Do you want banality from us? I think not.

This may be an unexpected thing to say in 2010, but I shall say it anyway.  Are you ready for my heresy? OK, here it is:

There are so many random words flying around cyberspace. We are in an eternal babble so loud we can hardly hear ourselves think.  There is a frenzy of chatter assaulting our inner ears. Where is the still, small voice?  Because just possibly the essence of creativity lies in that small pure sound if we can only hear it.

There are icicles outside my window. Strong, strange and mesmerizing. Drip by drip, night by frozen night, they have grown – crystalline, sharp and beautiful as a razor. It took time, it was hard to see it happen, but when I looked today they were bigger still.
How do we grow as writers? How do we become all we long to be? How do we take ourselves and our words into the world?

Could there be more in a drip than a tweet?

Weekly inspirational blog post: Not written.

Reason:  Insanely busy. See below.

So this photo: Irrelevant, but ain’t it cool!

Submissions: Cascading. More so than ever before. Will we always be open to general submissions? Yes in UK. Don’t know about USA - we’re hanging in there for now. Narrowly.

What would make that easier:  a) certain individuals not inundating me and b) knocking off the 15% (wild guess) who send completely irrelevant and wrongly targeted material that wastes ridiculous amounts of my time.

Courtesy levels: We try, we try.

Deals: Yes!  UK deal for Harriet Goodwin’s HEX FACTOR.  US deal about to be announced for . . . .  No, you’ll have to be patient.

Foreign: Yes! Great German auction for Brenna Yovanoff’s THE REPLACEMENT. Sold to Loewe Verlag.

Manuscripts: Getting through them. Kindle red hot.

Tax year: Ending soon. Just visited Joe, my number 1 dude (aka US accountant).

Number 2 dude: Eduardo, computer magician. Just set up whizzy Asus EEE netbook (14-hour battery life). Now I can work ANYWHERE (like I didn’t before???).

Number 1, 2 and 3 dudesses (female dudes): Mel, Nikki, Grace – who do money. And stuff.

Coffee:  A lot

New York: Tomorrow. SCBWI Winter Conference VIP cocktail party.

Conference: February. Asilomar. California.

Critiques: Look, I’ll get them done, OK.

Italy: March. Bologna book fair. Scheduling. Deciding who to invite to dinner.

Criteria: Cool industry people who we like.

Music currently in Mini CD player: Bach. Brandenburg Concertos.

Why: Lofty. Also soothing.

Sleep: Not enough.

Good news: Everywhere. Greenhouse is blooming!

Weather: Sunny.

Message to writers: Voice. Voice, voice, voice. And plot.

Now: Lunch.

What: Tortilla. Cheese.

Afternoon: Logging off to read and edit.

Reason: Care, precision and thoughtfulness are everything.

Finally: See you soon!

Tens of thousands were wiped out in Haiti last week, and because of that you may have missed one other quiet, dignified passing.

Miep Gies, aged 100, died on Monday in a nursing home in the Netherlands.

I have kept half an eye open for that announcement for some years – ever since I met Miep, already an elderly woman, in 1995. [I have decided to call her by her first name here because Ms Gies feels wrong, and because I think she would have comfortable with that informal friendliness.] She was part of an extraordinary period of my life, both personal and professional, and I will never forget it.

You may well know this already, but . . .

Miep Gies, along with her husband Jan, worked for Anne Frank’s father Otto, after the Frank family moved from Germany to the Netherlands in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews. From its new base on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht, Otto’s company – Opekta – sold pectin for jam-making, later diversifying into herbs and spices.

With the occupation of the Netherlands, life became increasingly difficult for Jews in general, and the Franks in particular. Desperate to save his company from confiscation, Otto made Opekta over to Jan Gies. But in 1942, the thing the Franks most feared finally happened – Margot, Anne’s sixteen-year-old sister - was summoned for deportation.

Now the Franks went into hiding in the famous Secret Annex behind the bookcase. And as Anne diligently, painstakingly poured out her heart to ‘Dear Kitty’, and as her famous Diary took shape over the next two years of captivity, Miep and a small group of fellow employees risked their lives to help the Franks and their friends, Fritz Pfeffer and the van Pelses.

Miep risked exposure and death on a daily basis as she struggled to bring the food, reading materials, clothes, and news that the Franks needed to survive. But she did even more than that. When the Franks were betrayed and the Annex raided on August 4, 1944, it was Miep who picked up the pages of Anne’s Diary which had been thrown on the floor and abandoned after their arrest. It was many years before she read that Diary, and she handed the pages intact to Otto Frank on his return after the war to the news of his murdered family – his girls taken by typhus in Bergen Belsen days before its liberation; his wife starved in Auschwitz.

So what is my connection to Miep Gies and the dreadful, inspiring story of Anne Frank?

In 1994, newly arrived as Editor at Macmillan Children’s Books in London, I was put in charge of publishing a new edition of the Diary which had languished untouched on the list until our red-hot, crazy-obsessed new team arrived to remake MCB. Full of fervour for the book and its power, we set to work, rejacketing it with a full-cover, haunting image of Anne Frank, and adding a searing new prologue by Rabbi Hugo Gryn, himself an Auschwitz survivor and beloved broadcaster on inter-faith issues in Britain.  Forget Hollywood celebs – I was awestruck by this man who had seen so much, suffered so much.

Lunch with Rabbi Gryn was a publishing experience of a whole new kind. What we were doing wasn’t just about sales or marketing – it was about what really mattered: justice, the truth of history, both remembering genocide and calling attention to it today. The Diary of Anne Frank had, and still has, the power to open eyes to all that.

At events in London to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II (co-sponsored by Macmillan), I met Elfriede ‘Fritzi’ Frank, Otto’s second wife, who with her daughter Eva had lived opposite the Franks in Merwedeplain, Amsterdam, before they too had gone into hiding and followed the same route to Auschwitz. In the devastation of the camps after the Nazis fled, Otto stumbled upon Elfriede again – and Eva subsequently became, in effect, stepsister to Anne.  Eva lived not far from me in north London; we met a number of times and became quite friendly.

In the flickering candlelight of the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, I shed a few secret tears as we remembered the life and death of Anne Frank. At Rabbi Gryn’s invitation I was possibly the only Gentile at an event commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – mesmerized as I heard a jack-booted Russian general tell how he had been first into the camp, and what he saw. Shutting my eyes in the darkness as hundreds of people around me chanted the Kaddish, the haunting prayer for the dead.

Then a special reception in honour of Anne Frank, where I met Buddy Elias, Anne’s much-loved cousin and only surviving relative (still living, I think, in Switzerland).

And then meeting Miep Gies. Shaking the hand of this quiet, elderly lady without whom there would have been no knowledge of Anne Frank, no Diary. A woman of such courage and forebearance. It was always said that she knew the identity of the Franks’ betrayer, but she never disclosed it or capitalized on it. Instead, every August 4 – the anniversary of the Franks’ arrest – she would stay alone in her house with the curtains drawn, remembering. And, she said, never a day went by in her subsequent life when she did not think about what had happened.

In the years that followed, I kept my connection to Anne Frank’s enduring legacy. In Amsterdam I went on a solo ‘pilgrimage’ to find Anne’s school and the family’s apartment on the Merwedeplein (now, I believe, restored and protected in perpetuity so that persecuted writers can work there). Visiting the House, I picked up The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank – published by Random House – and took it back to Macmillan, where we published it for a UK/Commonwealth audience. It was never going to sell a million, but it was important that it should be read, and kudos to Macmillan for supporting that. Several years later we published a photographic memorial to Anne’s life and times, full of newly released family pictures.

I got to know Gillian Walnes, the inestimable director of the Anne Frank Trust in London (http://www.annefrank.org.uk/), which does so much to expose and prevent persecution in all its forms today, in part through its travelling Anne Frank in the World exhibit. I met young people whose families had been slaughtered in Bosnia; elderly people who had been on the Kindertransports out of Germany during the war (often never seeing their parents again). And I met prisoners whose lives had been changed by the example of Anne Frank as they helped to host the exhibit in their jails.

Very excitingly, one of my sons – a chorister at Westminster Abbey at that time – sung at the Anne Frank Awards for Moral Courage which are given annually to young people who are shining examples of strength and bravery in adversity. 

So why is all this so important to us as writers and aspiring writers?

Well, it all comes down to that famous Diary – and to the spirit of Anne Frank, which blazed so strongly in her prose despite the privations and anxiety of her years of confinement. She was, quite simply, a great writer.  Not just a great TEENAGE writer, but a great writer. Period.  She was ruthlessly honest with herself; in her writing she spoke as she saw. She expressed herself strongly and effectively, and her zest for life shines through. Hearing a radio broadcast about the need for war diaries to be published, she set about readying her work for publication – her instincts married the commerciality of someone who saw her future as an author, with a deep belief in the integrity of what she was doing as a writer.

On my bookshelf is a copy of the Diary of Anne Frank, crudely wrapped for protection.  In the prelims are the signatures of Elfriede Frank, Eva Schloss, Buddy Elias, and Rabbi Hugo Gryn. I think I was too awestruck to ask Miep Gies for her autograph.

I knew I was touching history back in 1995 and that before long many of those names would have passed away. Indeed, Rabbi Gryn died in 1996, and Elfriede Frank in 1998.

I still receive a Christmas card every year from the management and staff of the Anne Frank House, and as I write, Otto Frank smiles over his shoulder at me from this year’s card. One day I will get in touch with the House again and see what they are doing over here in the USA.

How can we forget Anne Frank and the way her Diary affected us, touching our view of the past and our own present, and making us ask – what might we be capable of? Because of Anne’s shining spirit, acute observations and extraordinary writing skills, great humanitarian work is being done around the world, decades later, in her name.

As Anne said: ‘I want to go on living after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me! When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?’

Anne Frank, you were the best. And thank you, Miep Gies, for everything. We owe you.

Deep beneath Westminster, in the heart of London, is a complex of rooms that were a hidden secret for many years. They are the Cabinet War Rooms from where Winston Churchill and his team masterminded Britain’s response to the Nazi threat of World War II. From here, in austere, uncomfortable rooms full of pin-holed maps, Bakelite telephones and drab utility furniture, Britain was saved from the brink of invasion and D-Day was plotted.

Seventy years on, in a world of GPS, 24-hour news coverage, i-phone apps and Twitter, it is awe-inspiring that a vast and desperate war was fought from these drab rooms by ingenuity, intelligence and a fair bit of bluffing . One of the very first transatlantic telephones – on which Churchill spoke to Roosevelt – is here, in a cupboard disguised as a toilet. The losses on a pivotal day of the Battle of Britain are scratched on a simple chalkboard, and a sign announces that a klaxon will sound in the event of a direct bomb hit (workers down here were told the place was bomb-proof, but it absolutely wasn’t). By our standards it all looks so primitive, but what emanated from these rooms – not least some of Churchill’s most iconic speeches – was staggeringly powerful.

The spirit of one man permeates these corridors – Winston Churchill. Larger than life, working 18-hour days, puffing on his ever-present cigar, Churchill was a fascinating giant of a character. Exacting (often frighteningly so), constantly bursting with ideas, he demanded everything of himself and expected the same commitment of others. Walk through into the exhibition of his life, and your picture of this man fills out. Consistently voted the Greatest Brit Who Ever Lived (though he was half American, on his mom’s side), he was complex and flawed, brilliant and prescient, passionate and difficult – a true maverick before that word became a political gimmick. In our time of managed soundbites, ruthless control and spin, Churchill would probably never have got off political first base, but thank heaven that destiny threw him up when it did.

So what do I admire about Winston Churchill, and what made him such a brilliant war-time prime minister?

Everything he did was based on experience: As a young man, despite the aristocratic blood running through his veins, he fought in the Boer War, escaping from a train and, with a price on his head, got himself back to Britain. As an officer in the trenches in World War I he led from the front – his men admired him because he only asked them to do what he was prepared to do himself, and he was cool under fire. He didn’t just talk the talk; he’d waded through the mud with bullets blasting at him.

He was accountable and he took calculated risks: The world has always been full of pundits and pontificators, but it’s harder to find leaders who will take responsibility for huge decisions.  At a desperate moment in history, Churchill stepped up to the plate. He wasn’t always right, but he got it right more often than not.

He worked like a man possessed, but he did it HIS way: He worked in his pyjamas in bed most mornings, he took a nap every afternoon for an hour, and he was still going at 1am. He pushed himself endlessly because he knew the vital importance of what he was doing.
He had ideas – and he thought outside the envelope:  Not all his ideas came off, sometimes people laughed at him, but frequently he was right and his ideas proved pivotal. He thought in fresh ways, he never stopped imagining and looking for new ways to find an advantage over the enemy. He had great mental agility – born in an age of cavalry charges, in his later life he foresaw the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

He was a wonderful communicator: As a speaker he was sonorous, inspiring and memorable. But he was also fabulously witty. Read some of his many sayings and you’ll see what I mean – he was verbally dextrous, sharp as a knife, and very, very funny. No situation was so bad that he couldn’t illuminate it with his often acid wit. He ploughed his own linguistic furrow – no modern, sloppy vernacular for him!

He bounced back from failure: Churchill knew the ‘black dog’ of depression. Blamed for the mess of Gallipoli, he said, ‘I’m finished’. But he wasn’t – he came back to lead his country. Losing the election before VJ Day, he was devastated, but went on to have huge input into the debates of his time. He wouldn’t be put down and he wouldn’t be silenced.

He was tough, even ruthless, but always humane. He drove his team mad – but they wouldn’t have worked for anyone else. He growled and grumped; he pretended to be deaf when he didn’t want to hear something; he lit up a room.

He never stopped being himself: He always ate three substantial meals per day. He loved port and Stilton. He started a trend for bizarre fuzzy ‘romper suits’. He could be fantastically rude, but he was also endearing.

So, why I on earth am going on about Winston Churchill when I’m a children’s literary agent sitting at a desk in the USA?  Have I gone completely mad? Well, maybe – but you see, I believe the whole of life is joined up and that the things we discover about ourselves and the world permeate seamlessly into all areas of our life. And that includes writing, and the often perplexing business of books.

As we head into the (metaphorical) U-boat convoys of 2010, I salute the spirit of Winston Churchill, and I dare to put my little feet in his massive footprints. I also commend him to you. We may not be fighting a world war, but we fight other wars – often within ourselves. Wars of despondency, anxiety, defeat. Narrowness of vision. Inflexibility. Self-pity. Conformity – forgetting who we really are. Willingness to accept the second rate.  Whether we are writers, agents or publishers, Churchill challenges us to get up, get going, tough it out – and live our lives in the brightest and boldest of colours. We may not always win, we may discover harsh truths about ourselves, but we can bounce back, fighting.

Finally, there are just two more – very important - things I want to tell you about Churchill.

Married to Clementine Hozier, his life-long love, he said, ‘I lived happily ever after’. His Clemmie told him the truth, and they gave each other mutual support all their lives. Who is the colleague/animal/friend/partner/spouse who is the Clemmie in YOUR life? Who can celebrate with you, hold you up when it all goes wrong, and remind you that there are even bigger things in the world than your writing ambitions?

Churchill was a wonderful painter in oils.  He could have been a professional. When it all got too much, he took himself off with his old hat, palette and easel. Before his death he said he’d like to spend the first million years of the afterlife painting.  What fills YOU with joy and helps you keep life in perspective? In a business with few predictable outcomes, we all need that antidote.

In this first week of 2010, a new picture hangs on the Greenhouse wall – of those 1940s airmen staring at the sky. ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few.’

So true. Rest in peace, Sir Winston. And to all of us, a courageous, productive and Stilton-filled new year.

So here it is.  The last post before Christmas, and the last of 2009. And here’s a photo taken just before the great Greenhouse UK lunch, which rounded off the year in London.  (Bookended by Sarah and Julia, see if you can spot the authors in the middle.)

With Julia nestled in her remote Undisclosed European Hideaway for the holidays, and me about to close the Greenhouse door until New Year, it’s time to think about what we did, where we are, and where we’re going.

With glass of wine in hand, carol singers outside rousingly telling of figgy puddings, and puffing on a meditative cigar (OK, I’m joking about the cigar), here’s the story of Greenhouse this year:

Around 8000 queries read (give or take a thousand or two)

Many deals done, including two major auctions and ascending for a while to Number 3 for middle-grade sales in the USA (actually we’d have been Number 1 except our ‘cumulative sales’ aren’t that high, since we’re still very young).

Our first four authors actually published – Sarwat Chadda, Harriet Goodwin, Valerie Patterson and now Alexandra Diaz who officially published on December 22.

Travels (and talking about writing) – to Florida, Bologna, Boston, Paris, Los Angeles, Vermont, San Francisco, New York – and London. And Julia travelling the length and breadth of the British Isles speaking at writers’ events.

The beginnings of foreign deals – Denmark, Russia, Hungary among them.

Three of our clients co-represented for film, by Monteiro Rose, Intellectual Property Group and ICM.  Fingers crossed for our first film deal in 2010.

Our first full year of business completed. No longer a newcomer, but an established part of the US and UK children’s books scene. And poised to apply early in 2010 to join AAR (Association of Authors’ Representatives) in the US, which requires a minimum of two years in business.

The growth of the Greenhouse family, both human and animal. New Yorker Allison Heiny joined Rights People, our foreign-rights sister company, early in 2009. Lucy and The Wee Man became Resident Hounds in April and August.  And Chippy, a Californian sea lion shot in the head by some idiot’s bullet, was adopted in September.

Phase 2 of the Greenhouse website came into being: an enhanced Author section, books database, Twitter link, and dedicated YouTube channel, on which we can actually show you our authors and books in action.

Not only surviving a grim recession, but thriving through it. Believing that keeping our high standards, making careful decisions, attacking this literary life with passion, belief and a shed-load of hard work, will get us through.

And now, our very first Greenhouse baby has arrived to bless this Christmas. Lindsey Leavitt’s new daughter, happy and healthy, arrived yesterday in our very own nativity.

As I write, there is unprecedented London snow outside my window. The last time I remember snow in Christmas week was the 1960s, and while Brits will tell you it’s a disaster, the world has fallen apart, there is something that appeals to the British spirit about the muddle and mayhem two inches of snow causes in the UK. We hark back to the Blitz, to Dunkirk, to every other victory and defeat marked by flinty-eyed resolution, a gritty prediction of disaster gratifyingly proved correct (just look at English soccer’s track record in penalty shootouts). We know what we’re doing when we’re standing in line waiting for the train that may never come. This is one of the things we’re very good at!

Somehow we will arrive at Christmas Day, and as we gather around our groaning and crowded table of eleven, I’ll raise a glass not only to the Greenhouse, but all the friends and partners Julia and I have encountered this year – whether writers, editors, publishers, agents, scouts, movie people, and all the myriad others who make this such a great business to be in.

Happy Christmas and the best of new years to everyone.

With love from

Sarah and all at the Greenhouse x

Two utterly disparate thoughts are in my head as we launch into one of the busiest weeks of the year.

The first: A gentleman whose work I recently turned down, emailed me back (very kindly) and said. ‘It’s nice to think there’s a real person out there.’ Which reminded me again how agents must often seem so distant, enigmatic – and beastly.

The second: The Wee Man is growing up.  Now, if you don’t know who on earth The Wee Man is, here’s a photo of him. This guy – our office intern - shot to international fame when he starred in his very own post [The view from under the desk] a few months ago, and many of you reference him in your emails to me.  Now seven months old and incredibly mature in his literary acumen, the WM is truly punching above his weight in the Greenhouse.

So – with the jollity of Christmas fast approaching, and with the team feeling unusually mellow, WM has come up with the idea of interviewing me. Yes, me! It’s embarrassing, and it’s taken him ages to convince me, but let’s say this is my small attempt to let you into my Secret World – and convince you I’m not a complete wart on the rear of humanity. That I am, indeed, a ‘real person’!

So, take it away Wee man . . . .

OK, boss. So let’s start at the very beginning. What is your earliest memory?

A pale pink dress that I wore for my ballet class’s Daisy Chain Dance; the excruciating embarrassment of being on stage and everyone laughing.

Snow: there was a lot more snow in Britain back in the winters of my childhood. Tracking the milkman and convincing ourselves he was a burglar.

JFK’s death: I was sick in bed and given the tiny portable black-and-white TV to entertain myself. There was only one hour of children’s programming per day, so I watched the News. Images of the assassination broke in; I climbed out of bed and padded into the living-room to tell my parents. I hadn’t a clue what the death of this man meant, but I sensed it was huge.

What turned you into a reader and what books had the greatest effect on you?

I remember sitting on the wood floor of our public library and pulling books off the shelf with a kind of awe. I always borrowed the maximum number allowable. I learned to read with MILLY MOLLY MANDY (a baby kept in a drawer – fancy!). I devoured Enid Blyton and any/all stories about ponies, rosettes and gymkhanas. I loved Willard Price’s amazing adventure series –TIGER ADVENTURE, LION ADVENTURE . . . .  I cut my teeth on commercial collectability! I also loved the British classics: THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN, THE SECRET GARDEN. You could never read those enough times.

As a teenager, Tolkien knocked my socks off. THE LORD OF THE RINGS was like a holy experience (the only novel I’ve read as an adult that has come close was Donna Tartt’s SECRET HISTORY). I also spent hours - again, on the floor - diving into my father’s massive collection of war books. Learned, detailed works on the Somme, on life in the Blitz, on Special Ops in World War II.  I credit my father with my love of history and its literature, and now my sons share that.

What kind of student were you?

I was shy, teased, too fat, too willing to blush at all times, and one of the last to be chosen for sports teams. I thought I was useless and that was a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I was 16 I had an epiphany –I was good at English! It took my teachers a while to catch up with that revelation, but in my final two years at school I shone in everything literary, especially what they call ‘lit crit’. I could write for hours on line 3, stanza 2 (whatever poem), explaining why the language worked the way it did. I was also becoming a bit of a secret performer [see My life in the spotlight Part 1). One of my sweetest school memories is of singing alone with my guitar on stage in Assembly; apart from my very close friends, no one had a clue that quiet Sarah could do it and you could have heard a pin drop.

My school experiences gave me a great desire to help release people’s potential – especially that of young people. I was largely written off, my future seen as limited. In the end, my Head Teacher had to write a special letter accompanying my university application, saying they had badly underestimated me, because I got top marks in my final exams. Beating the odds, helping others to beat the odds, is a theme for me. You can’t base your life on other people’s expectations or experience of you – you just have to go out and make it happen for yourself.

What might you be doing now if you hadn’t gone into the children’s books business?

I believe I am in the perfect niche that plays to all my strengths and experience(s). However, I would also have liked to train as a coloratura soprano or continue performing as a singer-songwriter (Shawn Colvin meets Tori Amos). I love everything verbal – especially vocal performance (I read a lot aloud and used to compete in verse-speaking and drama comps), so would have enjoyed some aspects of TV presenter/journalist. I have also trained for a year in psychotherapy and that has always held a lot of interest for me – and is, in fact, very relevant to working alongside authors!

I would also enjoy anything entrepreneurial where you have to create something from nothing. For example, a fabulous chain of patisserie shops, on the French model. There’s not enough great coffee and cake in the USA!

What jobs did you do prior to running the Greenhouse and being an agent?

I started my publishing career back in the Dark Ages, as a member of Lady Collins’s religious books’ department at Collins in London. To understand this, you need to know that what is now HarperCollins used to be Sir William Collins Sons & Company Limited; and Lady Collins was married to ‘Sir Billy’ Collins.  (Harper & Row was amalgamated comparatively recently).

From there I spent 5 years with Armada, the commercial children’s paperback imprint of Fontana, which was itself the paperback side of Collins. Next came a year editing adult fiction blockbusters, then a spell freelance – doing the editorial jobs that were too demanding for inhouse staff to tackle. After that I worked for a number of years for Transworld (now part of Random House), again on children’s books. This was at a time when a lot of today’s mega-famous writers were just breaking out – Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, Anthony Horowitz, Jacqueline Wilson among them. I joined Macmillan in 1994 as Fiction Editor and was there until 2007, moving up the ladder to become Publishing Director of the whole editorial side. I was also on the management board, and had about 20 staff reporting to me.

My publishing career has enabled me to understand all sides of this business, which is very useful. I know how writers feel, because I’ve worked with them at the rock-face for around 30 years. I know the constraints and stresses publishers labour under. While there are moments when agents must be confrontational, I have tried to create an agency environment of partnership/collaboration where we work WITH publishers, respecting what they do.

What are the best parts of your job as Greenhouse agent – and what are the parts you find most difficult?

There is nothing in the world to beat the thrill of calling an author and telling them that yes, they WILL be published! That their life’s dream has come to pass.  Whatever the size of the deal, there are tears, disbelief, joy – and it’s my job to help them negotiate their way through all the emotions that come in this strange process.

I love the people side of this job, all the relationships, but I also love the hard-nosed thing of doing deals, making money for people. And I love strategizing and negotiating – what step should come next to get us where we want to be.  You need to be quick-thinking, charming, patient as Job, passionate, articulate, tough . . . I strive to be gracious, and to retain my integrity in all situations.

The hardest parts of the job are – making fast, good decisions about writing and writers. The volume is tremendous. And the horrid thing is, you can’t represent everyone. It’s easy for a writer to feel that getting an agent is the ultimate destination. However, it’s only the first step on a long journey, and if I don’t have a personal conviction and feel for your work, that I can really advocate for it and ultimately sell it, then it would be better for me to step aside.  Sometimes I will make mistakes, and I’m always aware of the hurt of the writer who feels rejected. It would be lovely to be able to give more feedback, but the time constraints often make this very difficult.

How quickly do you know if you have found a manuscript that is going to succeed?

I often have a real physical reaction as I discover a great story; a quietness will come over me, a prickling of the neck! I can usually tell from the first page if a writer has outstanding potential, because I will already be picking up Voice, but I have to read a lot further to see if the plotting holds water. Because I generally first-read on a Kindle, with interruptions, I like to go back and re-read on hard copy –an old-fashioned manuscript, with pencil and Post-It notes in hand. You see, editorially I am old-school, and that’s how I consider detail best.
I hate the rapid-fire pressure of the industry (particularly as more and more people become agents and there’s pressure to grab talent). It’s very rare that I read something and then instantly pick up the phone. I like to consider, make notes, come up with an editorial strategy that I can share with the writer before taking things further.  I want a story to be as good as it can be, and for any deal to be as big as it could be, and I therefore need to see if the author is on board to work with me, if that feels necessary. I would never take an author on and then suddenly announce that I had editorial suggestions – I like everything to be out in the open from the start.

What do you think is the hardest thing about being a writer?

Ann Patchett said some wonderfully apt things in today’s Washington Post book review. ‘Writing is an endless confrontation with my own lack of talent and intelligence, because if I were as smart and talented as I ought to be, I would have finished this book by now.’

I think every author feels like this at times. The black worm of self-doubt in the small hours of the night. The sense of unworthiness. The ‘imposter syndrome’ (I’m successful, but when they find out how bad I really am, I won’t be!). The fear of failure, creative dryness, paralysis, criticism. You name it, authors feel it. I like them to share that with me – the secret fears – because there are few vocations in the universe that make demands on an individual’s psyche like that of writing. You live in your head, off your wits; the famine of isolation, the feast of publicity (some unwelcome). Your vacation can be decimated, your Christmas put on hold – because an editor suddenly decides to break seven months of silence and give you a deadline of one month’s time.

Am I putting you off? I hope not, because there are glories too. But you need to be very realistic about how hard this is, what it will cost you. And you need to know that this is what you DO. This is your trade, your calling, your joy. And keep smiling and philosophical throughout. Family and friends won’t understand what you are going through, but as a Greenhouse author you have the support of writers (and agents) who understand, and that is something I don’t want us ever to lose.

What do you most enjoy about Christmas, and what gift are you most hoping to receive?

The gift will be seeing my two sons, putting my arms around them and standing there for a number of minutes. We’ll all be together in London, my extended family, and we will resume the rituals that give our particular Christmas its unique flavor (and occasional craziness). I love Christmas music, the quality of the night air, the moans at the Queen’s Speech, games of Boggle, the generations changing. The fact that I am no longer the ‘Christmas Elf’ (who sits on the stool and distributes the gifts) but have given way to the Young Pretenders. I love looking back and seeing how far we all came this year, in both inner and outward journeys. This year the Christmas Day toast to ‘absent friends’ will include all my Greenhouse friends across the world. I’m proud of us all!

Right then, Boss. Hey, it’s Sunday – should you still be at The Desk? How about giving a dog a bone and a sojourn at the mailbox?

Sure, Wee Man.  Thanks for the interview and turn off the lights on your way out?