Reporter Libby Cudmore’s Novel Accepted By Top NYC Publisher
By JIM KEVLIN • HOMETOWN ONEONTA, The Freeman’s Journal
Edition of Thursday-Friday, Oct. 9-10, 2014
It had been a bad week, and suddenly Libby Cudmore was crying. But they were tears of joy.
At the other end of the telephone Tuesday, Sept. 30, was Jim McCarthy, a vice president at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, the agency that, among other notable authors, represented President Obama in placing his memoir, “Dreams of My Father.”
McCarthy told Libby that her crime novel – its working title is “No Awkward Goodbyes,” but that likely will be changed – had been accepted by the eminent publishing house, William Morrow, now a subsidiary of HarperCollins. After using a few literary agents, finally, there is success. Her editor at Morrow will be Chelsey Emmelhainz.
Libby, a reporter with Hometown Oneonta & The Freeman’s Journal since 2010, had been writing long fiction since her teens. She had experimented with fantasy and sci-fi before settling on who-dun-its. She has written three earlier novels, placing two with agents, but they were “roundly rejected,” she said, adding with delight: “…and now this.”
William Morrow plans to market Libby as “a debut author,” her agent told her. The manuscript will be back to her by December with suggested revisions. The edits are due back in New York City by February. And publication is planned early in 2016.
“I made the world a lot more likeable,” the soon-to-be-published novelist said when asked to explain her latest manuscript’s success. “It was less grim. It was more modern, less of a throwback to retro noire.” Her characters “have cell phones; they have Facebook profiles.”
The novel is set in a fictional district of Brooklyn –Barter Street – “just outside hipster Williamsburg.”
As Libby describes it, the protagonist, Jett Bennett, “an amateur detective and professional temp,” finds a mixtape in her mailbox addressed to her downstairs neighbor, Kit Kat. When she goes to deliver the mis-delivered package, Jett finds KitKat dead, and the tape is the only clue to the murder.
A native of Oklahoma, Libby was raised in Cobleskill, daughter of Dana Cudmore, editor of The Daily Editor and author of “The Remarkable Howe Cavern Story,” and Nancy Feldman.
She graduated from Cobleskill-Richmondville Central School in 2001, and in 2005 from Binghamton University, majoring in English creative writing. An indication of things to come, perhaps, she was a recipient of the Andrew Bergman Scholarship in Creative Writing and a finalist for the national Writers of the Future Award.
After working in New York City, she enrolled with the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program, earning a master’s in 2010 in popular fiction and creative non-fiction. By then, she had met Ian Austin, now this newspaper’s photographer, and the couple – they plan to marry next year – had settled in his hometown of Oneonta.
While working at the newspapers – she began working on her latest novel while commuting back and forth to Oneonta on the OPT – she also wrote a blog for a year, “Geek Girl Goes Glam,” where she tried out tips from vintage beauty guides published between the 1800s and the 1970s, and shared her findings with her online fans.
Libby happened on her genre when, while in college, she read Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” and “it all clicked … ‘The Long Goodbye’ has such a beautiful sense of melancholy, or hope, that surrounds the mystery. And I thought that was more interesting than somebody with a sword or a space ship. The act of solving a crime and doing right by people. Doing right by the client. There is honor is that.”