Jacob Sager Weinstein ’94 Is Never Not Writing

Jacob Sager Weinstein ’94 is a prolific author, although such a highfalutin term might make him blush. He has written picture books for children, such as Lyric McKerrigan, Secret Librarian, and What Rosa Brought, about his mother’s family’s flight from the Nazis. He has written a series of novels aimed at young adult or middle-grade readers, such as Hyacinth and the Secrets Beneath. And he has written books aimed at adults (in the marketing, at least) with such titles as, How Not to Kill Your Baby, The Government Manual for New Superheroes, and Be Happier Now: 100 Simple Ways to Become Instantly Happier. His real demographic might better be described as the young at heart.

Still, as any writer might appreciate, one benefit of such diversity is that there is always something to do when he is wasting time.

“If you’re stuck on one thing, you can procrastinate productively by working on the other thing,” he reasons.

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Juggling multiple literary projects is one of the realities of being a freelance author. Some transitions, though, are harder than others. “When you write a book about the Holocaust, if I changed a word I would be wrecked for the rest of the day,” Sager Weinstein says. “If you’re writing about a superhero librarian, it’s a little easier to put that aside and jump to something else.”

One of Sager Weinstein’s literary muses is Ivan Pavlov, the Russian psychologist known for training dogs. For each book he writes, Sager Weinstein says, he builds a themed musical playlist, which he uses to get his creative juices flowing. When he was writing Hyacinth, for example, which is set in a magical world beneath the streets of London, he built a playlist of songs entirely about London. “The downside is that those songs are then completely ruined for me.”

Sager Weinstein and his wife, Lauren Sager Weinstein ’95, have lived in London since 2002, when Lauren joined Transport for London. They had been living in Los Angeles, where Jacob was a staff writer for comedian Dennis Miller’s late night talk show. Since she had followed him to the West Coast, he decided it was his turn to be a good spouse and support her career. Also, Dennis Miller Live was canceled a week later.

“So I got all the husband brownie points with no actual sacrifice,” he jokes.

He tried writing screenplays before turning to writing books, especially children’s books, after his own kids were born. Like most children’s book authors, Sager Weinstein writes the text, and the publisher pairs him with an illustrator. He says it works out for the best that way. “I might be able to draw a stick figure if you give me enough time.”

As usual, Sager Weinstein has several new projects in the works, including another middle-grade novel and several picture book manuscripts, all at different stages of revision. Whenever he gets stuck on one, he just moves to another. As he explained on PAW’s Q&A Podcast in 2018, “You can always revise a bad first draft, but you can’t revise a blank page.”Jacob Sager Weinstein