N. M. Kelby

Bio

I come from a long-line of "spare time" artists. My mother was a painter. My father, a photographer. Following in the family tradition, I spent twenty years pursuing a literary career while I worked as a print, and later, television reporter. I wrote plays in my spare time. I wrote poems in my spare time. I wrote grants to write more plays and poems in my spare time. But, despite the fact that the poems were published and the plays were produced, I never felt that I could give up my day job to write.

Then, my father was killed. He was just standing on the sidewalk in front of the house he was born in, the house he lived in all his life, when a young man reached down to change the channel on his radio and lost control of his car. It all happened in a moment, and in that moment I knew that no one has any "spare time."

So, I left my "day job" shortly after that, and so did my husband. He took care of the house and I wrote. We lived off our savings. Two years later In the Company of Angels was purchased by Hyperion.

Angels actually began as a graduate thesis. 300 plus pages which started with the sentence "She used to think they had horns of white chocolate" and went on to prove that I could create dialogue, plot --- and had some grasp of grammar.

I graduated but as a novel, my thesis read like homework.

So, I stripped it down to the bare plot, about 90 pages, and posted it on the novella line of Zoetrope's online writing workshop. I asked fellow workshop members to tell me what worked and didn't…and what they wanted to know more about.

The response was overwhelming, and very astute. So, I began to rebuild. Three months later, I sent the new Angels out to five agents. Three were interested. A month or so later Hyperion bought it.

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