Book Release Day!
Today is the day my very first book comes out. Onto the shelves, into your mailbox, onto your reading device. It’s here. And today I want to praise the blinking cursor.
A few years ago I sat down in front of my computer, put my hands on the keyboard and started writing. I had one scene in particular that just wouldn’t leave me alone. I thought to myself, this scene needs a first chapter. So, I wrote that too. I thought to myself, this chapter needs the rest of the book.
I signed up for a writing conference where I’d get the chance to pitch my story to agents and editors. I bought my very first (and only) blazer (lol), charged a hotel room to my credit card, and the following weekend I took the train to New Jersey to attend the conference. On the first day, I took a workshop on how to pitch your story. I spent hours practicing my pitch. I only slept for two hours that night. That next morning I got ice from the maker in the hotel hallway and held it against my eyes. Four hours after that, I sat across a folding table from Jess Verdi. My hands shook, she smiled, I pitched, she asked if the book was finished. I said yes (it wasn’t). She told me to send it to her. I packed my things and got back on the train on wobbly legs.
The next day I started writing and didn’t stop for three weeks. I edited for two more days and then I sent her the manuscript. Two months later, she wrote me an email. “We want your book.” Crimson Romance was going to publish me. I spent three ecstatic months working with Jess to edit, polish, and spit shine the book. At the end of those three months, I got an email from Jess informing me that Crimson had unexpectedly been dissolved. They were a publisher no longer. The rights of my unpublished manuscript were reverted back to me and my book lived no where but my hard drive.
But all was not lost. The head editor of Crimson decided to start her own literary agency. And one day Tara Gelsomino called me and told me all the reasons I should work with her. I wholeheartedly agreed. I was no longer alone. I had Tara working hard to make sure my book wouldn’t die a lonely death on my computer.
Just a few months after that Allison Carroll told me that she read my book on the train home from work because she had to know what happened next. She wanted to work with me. Suddenly, I was blessed with a book deal with Harlequin and yet another unbelievably gifted editor. My book was going to be a paperback. It was going to have the Harlequin diamond on the spine. We polished the book even further and started from scratch on two others. What had once just been a word doc on my computer was now pages and pages of printed drafts, inked up and dog-eared and real. When Allison moved on to Audible (!) I had the privilege of working with Michele Bidelspach and now, Cat Clyne (yet another brilliant editor, seriously I must have done something right in my past life).
One day, I got a heavy box in the mail from Cat, I opened it up and there were twenty shiny galley copies of my book blinking up at me. The first thing I did was smell one of them. Because people, it smelled like a book, a real book. One you could hold and rifle through and squeeze to your chest. And now, and now, and right now… it’s in boxes on trucks, speeding through time and space to make it into the hands of (god bless ‘em) readers. I look back at all these words I’ve just written and I see so many people who didn’t have to believe in this book, but they did. At one point, this wasn’t even a book. It was just words in a doc on my computer. And before that? It was just a story in my imagination. And there I was, looking at that blinking cursor. So, today, I praise the blinking cursor. Thank you. Thank you for the beginning.