Welcome...and Happy Black Friday!

Greetings from Breckenridge, Colorado!

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone and here we are once again at the start of another holiday season. This is the time every year when we pause to reflect on where we've come and where we want to go in the year ahead. Resolutions are made...and then promptly broken...and then promptly made again. I'm a sucker for the holiday season and a sucker for list-making and New Year's resolutions. I love Christmas music and Christmas lights, Christmas parties and Christmas shopping. Everything this time of year appears tinged with an aura of magic and optimism, however fleeting and idealized. At any rate, it just seems like a good time to launch this new phase of my life and get a head-start on 2012.

I am a Chicago-based novelist/playwright, literary agent, and teacher. I live and work in the West Loop neighborhood of Chicago. About a month ago, I published my first novel, "Birds of Dreams," as an e-book available for purchase on Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook. "Birds of Dreams" is a satire of sorts portraying what happens when reality television collides with everyday reality. It's set in Chicago and comprises a cast of characters as diverse as the city itself. I am on track to publish a print version of the novel in Spring 2012.

When I'm not writing or blogging or teaching, I run the Jonathan Scott Literary Agency, a boutique literary agency that specializes in representing authors with unique and personal stories to tell--whether memoir, narrative non-fiction, or (my favorite) books about food and wine. I opened the agency in 2005 after eights years' working as an acquisitions editor. We've had our ups and downs over the past six years but I am happy to say that I feel things are really on track now. I've limited the number of new clients I take on, therefore allowing me to devote individualized attention to each. It's never easy going into business for yourself but ultimately I love the freedom and the knowledge that whatever happens, my only responsibility is to myself and my clients. It's rather liberating actually.

But I feel I've become complacent over the past couple of years. I endured a fair bit of transition and no small amount of insecurity. I am happy to say, though, that as a result I've come back better and stronger than ever before. The novel is perhaps my culminating effort in this regard as is the discovery of a love for teaching English, particularly to children living in less-than-advantageous circumstances. I feel this blog is the next step in my journey...

So the blog...what is it? What is it going to be? As anyone knows who has ever published a book or works with people who publish books, the key to author success is brand marketing. A publisher will only do so much for an author in this regard. As I tell my clients all the time, if you want to be successfully published, if you want people to read your book, if you want to make it onto the bestseller lists, you need to promote yourself. A blog is a great place to start.

This blog is about--as the title suggests--an author on the town. The author in question is me. This blog is a daily online journal, chronicling my successes and failures, my hopes and frustrations, my business, personal, and social dealings: for better or worse, for richer or poorer. It will reflect the world as I see it: Gossip Girl mixed with a male version of Sex and the City, if you will. It will portray in real-time the world of the novel: the restaurants, the bars/clubs, the grind of entrepreneurship, the personalities, the conflicts, the ambitions and aspirations, the dreams realized and the dreams deferred. A rather grand scheme, I realize...but why not?

I urge you to check in daily. And I love feedback, so feel free to post comments, questions, suggestions, stories, whatever comes to mind. For now, I leave you with this...

QUESTION OF THE DAY: "What does it mean for something to be considered culturally relevant? When is something culturally irrelevant? Share your thoughts."