My Start: 

By Daphne Uviller

My first break came in the form of a 350-word book review. I had left my entertaining job at a law enforcement agency with its small but steady salary, excellent cocktail party fodder, and dependable health benefits to...Write. I eased my way into this underpaid life by interning at The Paris Review. While reading through the slush pile there, I had the revelation that my short stories were like most of the ones I was reading – quite good, but not good enough. Not good enough to merit holing up for a decade, working on fiction: I was too young for obscurity. I began to thumb through advance reading copies (also known as galleys) that publishing houses send to reviewers, and which stood in stacks around the office. I happened upon a galley of Tom Perrotta’s first novel, The Wishbones. I read it, I loved it, I wrote a sample book review and sent it to an editor I’d been introduced to at Time Out New York magazine.  And then I waited.

And waited. And called the book review editor. And waited. And called again. It took all my courage to noodge her. I hated noodging editors. I’ve gotten very good at it over the years, but back then, it took me an hour to work up the courage to bug someone.  Out of the blue, about two months after I’d first submitted it, the editor called to tell me she was publishing my review. I was over the moon – I’d hoped that my sample would win me a spec assignment, but never imagined that the sample itself would actually be published

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Of course, when it came out – my name! in print! – the last line had been rewritten. Someone had added the words “delightful romp,” a Wal-Marty, pansy phrase if ever there was one. I moaned and groaned and wrung my hands and then I got over it. And since then, my words have been mangled by editors as many times as they have been improved or left alone by them. I’ve learned that it’s part of the business, and that the more I write the less it matters if a piece here or there is unimproved upon. (Which is what I would remind the writers submitting reviews to me after I became the books editor at Time Out a few years later.)

Today, hundreds of book reviews, articles, one WEBook novel, and one anthology later, and even with my first solo novel, Super in the City, about to hit bookstores, I still don’t know whether I’m self-employed or unemployed.  What I do know is that it is other writers’ generosity that has given me opportunities every step of the way: writers who share their editorial contacts or give feedback and encouragement or tell me about how they got their starts or who pass on assignments they don’t have time to accept.  I continue to try my best to pay it forward whenever I can.

Daphne Uviller is proud to have worked on Pandora, WEBook’s first community-sourced novel. Her bio and books can be found on her web site at www.daphneuviller.com.

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