A few weeks after meeting Jules Asner at Weinstein Books's BookExpo party, I got on the phone with her to talk about the backstory to her first novel, Whacked. "I'd always hoped I would write a novel when I grew up," she told me, "and then one day, I was 35, and I realized I was a grownup." The story, about a TV scriptwriter bouncing back from a failed relationship, is based on a bad breakup Asner went through a long time ago, and she admits that she pulled some of the same tricks as her protagonist, including rifling through her boyfriend's receipts and emails looking for evidence of an affair. At one point, she debated whether she really wanted to keep dredging up those emotions, but then, she decided, "I didn't want to be the person who didn't finish her book."

Throughout the process, her husband, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, was supportive, but from, given his own creative responsibilities, he wasn't hovering over her. At first, it was hard for Asner not to compare her slow progress to his accelerated routine. "He can shoot all day, edit at night, and then stay up until 3 A.M. writing something else," she said. "You have to remind yourself that that's not normal." She didn't show him anything for a long time ("I was afraid of what would happened if it sucked") but when she had her first hundred pages, she gave them to him, and a simple bit of positive feedback in the midst of a phone conversation later on was enough to keep her motivated.

And the path to publication? Asner blushes to tell the story, but just a few hours after finishing the manuscript, she went out and ran into Harvey Weinstein, the book came up in conversation, and he asked if he could look at it. So she sent him a copy, he read it on a flight to London, and called her to let her know he wanted to buy it. (In fact, they ultimately decided to push back the release date so it would go out under the Weinstein imprint rather than the old Miramax brand.) She's already at work on a second novel.