Rumors

Didja hear the one about agent Kristin Nelson turning down Twilight?

Rumors can be a funny thing. They can also be incredibly damaging. When I was in high school, a rumor got started that I had slept with some guy I’d been dating for about a week and a half over the summer. (Not true.) Oddly enough, rather than hurting my reputation, it gave me some bizarro cool cred, and all of a sudden, friends of mine — good friends — began to admit to me that though they had always maintained they hadn’t been having sex with their long term boyfriends, they actually had been, and it was now okay to admit it to me because, well, they now knew I had been having sex, too.

I don’t know why they thought they couldn’t tell me before, but it was pretty disappointing for all of us as the truths came out. I later discovered that the whole rumor had been started because, at a basketball game, some girl had spilled her giant yellow-in-foil-wrappers cough drops out of her purse, and me and another girlfriend started giggling because we thought they were condoms. And clearly, because I knew what condoms looked like…

Yeah, I know. Bizarre. It’s weird how rumors get started. I’m sure there are much stranger rumors about me that I’ve never heard, but that one takes the cake for rumors that have gotten back to me — and it’s about twelve years old.

In the writing world, rumors fly fast and furious. An offhand comment an agent makes at a conference panel gets handed down as if it’s the Word On High — no vampires! — etc. Lots of good advice goes bad. People fall for stupid lines like, “the kind of agent you can get before you’re published isn’t the kind of agent you want” and end up getting screwed on a contract or worse, sign with some scam agent who steals their money. I’ve heard some pretty crazy rumors since being in this industry, most of which can be resolved with even a cursory look into the subject of the rumor. Can’t get an agent without having a publisher? I did. So did almost every other writer I know. Can’t sell directly to New York (this is a new one I’ve seen cropping up a lot)? Again — I did, and so have most of my writer friends.

I’ve even heard strange rumors about me. A few months back, someone (anonymous, of course), told me they’d heard that “even though I’d sold my first contract for good money on proposal, I hated doing it and was never going to sell on proposal again because the money wasn’t worth it.” Huh? This was an especially weird rumor because, well, since selling my first contract, I’d gone ahead and sold two more contracts, both on proposal. So far, my entire career as a writer is based upon my selling novels on proposal. And it’s great! Might I write a whole novel before trying to sell it? Sure. Might I not? Also, sure. Never say never. But this one had me baffled. I have no idea how this person could have gotten such a strange idea.

So, what’s the strangest rumor you’ve ever heard about yourself? Leave a comment here and I’ll enter you in a drawing to win a copy of my latest book!