The downside of being friends with an editor

I’m not sure how much editors get paid, but maybe it’s not the pay that they’re interested in anyway. I think people become editors because they secretly wanted to be movie stars.

When my editor at Penguin, Tim Travaglini, came out to the SCBWI event in Arizona I told him, offhandedly, that we’d sit together for lunch. Big mistake. After his talk he was surrounded by people who wanted to meet him. One would leave, we would take a step towards the food table, and someone else would come up and gush about how much they enjoyed his presentation–and would he be interested in a story about insecure porcupines? And would it help their submission chances if they taped dollar bills onto page two? And did he know how extremely handsome he was? A Brad Pitt double, in fact.

No wonder the man thinks he’s always right. He could have said his shoes were made of cheese and had three people volunteer to eat them.

Anyway, twenty minutes later when we’d moved approximately two feet, I realized what a bad idea it is to eat with an editor. I nearly starved to death. Next conference, I’m pretending I don’t know who he is.