About 22 years ago, at band camp the summer before my freshman year of college, I met Mark. Our brains clicked.
Something like 12 years ago, we decided to start working on creative writing projects together.
Around 4 years ago, we started writing a novel.
Yesterday the sale of that novel was announced.
I think I was literally in the hospital after having my last kid when I said “Hey, we should do something like X.”
We wrote almost the whole thing on Google docs on our phones. We wrote in the middle of night while trying to get kids to sleep and during lunch breaks and in the car and on vacation. We went through…A LOT of edits. Whole narrative structure changes. We wrote two weddings and then erased a wedding and then wrote another wedding.
(Maybe once it’s released I’ll post that first wedding scene on here. It was cute.)
Once we decided it was ready we started querying. If you’ve never gone through it, that’s a soul-crushing process. Rejections started coming in. Most of the time there wasn’t even a rejection. You can get ghosted by agents a presses a lot when you’re querying.
I started thinking about self-publishing. I already had a little bit of experience (Phantom Menagerie now available!) so I set a date – after this day we’ll talk about doing it ourselves. The date passed. We had gotten a few requests for full manuscripts at that point and I don’t know, just wanted to keep trying.
Three dozen queries.
And now here we are!
We’re so excited to work with Jean and her team at Creative James Media. We can’t wait for you to meet Smitha and Joe and Alice and Inez and Mona and Charlie.
Now it’s time to get back to work.
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