Shana Silver

I'm invading your TV and you don't even know it!

I'm 27 years old and live just outside NYC. During the day, I make my living as a freelance computer animator. Chances are you've seen my work on TV. If you ever watched a sports program on CBS, like Sunday Football for example, you definitely witnessed some of my work. I designed the graphics for the sports package, like all those little stat graphics that pop onto your screen and tell you the score. My big claim to fame was designing the March Madness bracket screen. Aside from sports, I've worked on a CGI Barbie movie called THE BARBIE DIARIES. I created on air graphics for the short lived Star Jones show as well as other daytime programs on truTV. I've done visual effects for several TV pilots, none of which were picked up. And the number of commercials I've worked on is too numerous to list.

This is all part of my plan for world domination. Start with infiltrating the TV, then move on to book stores. After that, it's just a matter of sitting back and waiting. (Okay, I'm kidding about this last part)

When not brainwashing you with pretty animations, I spend all my spare time writing. This means I often neglect my boyfriend, but he doesn't seem to mind. I also neglect housework, but I don't mind this. I started writing since my first word. I wasn't too thrilled with the name my mom had called herself, "Mommy," so I made up my own replacement. "Bobu" seemed a much more appropriate title at the time. It's no surprise that I had an imaginary friend with magical powers (she could walk through lava. How cool is that? Though, not terribly useful growing up in NJ). I wrote and drew a picture book series about my magically enhanced friend as soon as I could string coherent sentences together. It only escalated from there. In high school, I kept notebooks full of poetry, song lyrics (even though I had no musical talent what-so-ever), and short stories.

I wrote my first novel when I was 17. This was before I learned about things like plots or character arcs. The book was 75k of existential ponderings (after all, we'd just finished studying Camus and Hamlet, and they deeply affected me). The book lacked a plot, wasn't separated into scenes, and none of the characters had names. It did have a premise though, miraculously, it was about a girl struggling to deal with her impending graduation and trying to grasp onto memories because life as she knew it would change forever once she left high school. Coincidentally, I was also about to graduate high school. Who would have thought, right? Luckily I had the good sense never to revise this, though I do regret making my poor mother read it. She loved it. But she doesn't have the best judgement, she also hangs and proudly displays all my artwork at home and in her office. Some of that stuff is not fit for public consumption.

I made better decisions in college except some of them were still limited by my lack of knowledge of the publishing industry. I wrote a book called PREMATURE EVACUATION about a girl whose spiral into underage drinking causes her sorority to lose their charter/house and she must face down her former sisters and confront her problem. I spent many long years revising this one, only one scene remained from first draft to final draft. I wrote a kick-ass query letter and had an 80% request rate. But I kept getting the same reason for rejection: too edgy for YA, too juvenile for adult and college-set novels are hard to market. After a two year hiatus from this novel, I now see other things wrong with it, but I do not feel it's worth my time to fix because it's a hard sell. After the crushing rejections, I spent a long time researching the publishing industry, devouring as many YA books as I could read (I'm approaching 150 YA books, so clearly I've made a lot of progress in this avenue). I subscribed to publisher's marketplace and started analyzing the types of books selling.

That's when I wrote THE ART OF SELLING MY SISTER. After six months of revisions and hard work, I wrote another excellent query, this time getting a 100% request rate. From query to representation from my agent took only 6 business days. The whole process was quick and painless.

THE ART OF SELLING MY SISTER
Status: on submission to publishers
Kasey Fishbein, sixteen, ruins her older sister's life by destroying her chances at a college dance scholarship. Now, she has to fix things for Lara before their parents find out.

THE ART OF SELLING MY SISTER came in third place in the 2007 RWA Chick-lit chapter's "Get your Stiletto in the door" contest. It also came in fourth place in the 2008 RWA North Texas chapter's "Great Expectations" chapter.

RHYTHM & CLUES
Status: with agent, waiting it's turn
Moxie Crane, a free-spirit girl with an unconventional home life, convinces her sheltered best friend, Gavin Tully, to rebel against his overprotective parents. But he takes her advice too far and runs away with a dangerous crowd.

CURRENT PROJECTS
I am currently working on two manuscripts, doing a rotating revision schedule. My agent is super excited about one, and the other is more of a freewrite while I mull over changes to the first. I will refrain from sharing the premises of these until they are further along in the revision process. They are both contemporary YA.

SHORT FICTION
My short fiction has been published in ShatterColors Literary Review, The Hiss Quarterly, The Deepening, and Shine Journal.

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