The HEA Cafe

Recently, I had a an email conversation with a writer friend. She was discouraged because, even though she’d had some success with contests and landed an agent, after years of writing she still hadn’t sold. In a response to another friend’s congratulations on a contest final, she wrote: it’s hard to keep believing “this will be the one.”

I wasn’t functioning on all cylinders (which means just one cup of tea at that point), but I fired back a post before I could even think, because I felt she was doing herself a grave injustice. This is what I said:

What does *believing* have to do with it? I think there’s been so much emphasis on positive thinking in past years that the forest has got lost for the trees. Where positive thinking matters is that it keeps us working toward a goal. Believing that we can control things we can’t is crazy. The only thing you could control here was entering the contest. You finaled (w00t w00t) and now it’s completely out of your hands. What you do have is exposure and opportunity. Will it lead to anything? Who knows. but you can ride it for what it’s worth (like going to the conference which is GREAT). Will believing it will lead to something change the outcome? I sure don’t think so. Still, we have a mutual friend who sold her book based on a contest win, so the possibility must be acknowledged.

In many ways publishing (and life) is like throwing seeds into the wind. We can hope they’ll land somewhere and take root. But we can’t control that. We can only provide the opportunity. We can only keep going. The only way we can control things is to stop. And that isn’t an option for me, or for you.

To that, I would add now, that we get better at throwing those seeds. We learn how to gauge the wind. We find a hose and water–or learn how to do a rain dance. We do all we can and then trust the soil to nourish them and the sun to make them grow.

And then we go plant another garden. Happy writing!

Once upon a time I decided I was going to write books that people would love. I soon discovered I was very good at starting stories, but for some inexplicable reason, once started, they didn’t just keep going on their own.

Thinking perhaps I wasn’t starting them right, I did more research, created fuller and more original characters, and did everything in my power to begin my stories better. But just like airplanes before the Wright Brothers, they’d come crashing down to earth Every Single Time (around chapter three).

The truth was, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t understand Conflict; I wouldn’t recognize a Plot Point if it jumped up and bit me; I’d never heard of POV, was unaware of the Danger of Flashbacks, and thought author intrusion was Just Fine. In fact, it was under such Delusions that I began to write a story about a puritan heiress and a noble-turned highwayman that was set during England’s Restoration period.

This would be my practice book. It didn’t need to be perfect, but it had to have characters that were well drawn, a plot, lots of sex, and (of course) a happy ever after. As best as I can tell, I started it sometime in 1994. By May of 1996, having discovered I was a plotter, I’d managed to write nine chapters. Okay, so that wasn’t going fast, but it was much more than I’d accomplished on any manuscript in the past, and during that time I’d also been taking care of my mother who was dying of cancer, raising my family and working full-time.

Almost five years later I was only up to Chapter Fourteen. We’d moved. I’d stalled leaving my characters in a cold courtyard for almost nine months (for which they have still not forgiven me), restarted and revised several times, but . . . I was still writing. I’d written a first kiss, my first love scene, and discovered how much I didn’t understand my heroine. I’d also pondered the concept of voice and had the first three chapters final in the Emily contest. However, it was becoming clear that in order to finish the book, I was going to have to torture my characters, make them grow, and learn a lot more about the function of the comma.

By April of 2003, I had typed The End. I was entering contests with some success, submitting queries, pitching to editors and agents and . . .

getting rejected.

Which was okay, right, because it was my practice book? Although, somewhere between the afternoon where I’d fleshed out the premise and the day I realized it was done, it had become a Real Story. A story that needed to be Read (and loved) By Others. A story I would keep sending out until it sold.

Unfortunately the historical market had cooled off while I took eleven years to write the book. Maybe it hadn’t just cooled. Maybe it was really frozen. It was heartening to get personal rejections from editors. To get keep me in mind for another project from agents, but it also sucked.

And then one day I read about the American Title contest and had a hunch that might be a good way for my characters to find other folks who would love them. So, I sent it the manuscript. When the finalist email came almost exactly two years ago it brought with it the possibility of publication. For the next six months, my characters and I lived with that very real hope. In the end we made it almost to the final round.

I got to work on another book. The Raven’s Revenge languished on my hard drive. After all, it was my first book. First books don’t get published often. I’d moved on from writing historical romance and was now working on a young adult and an erotic women’s fiction.

Then one day a friend of mine asked to read it. She’d voted for it in the contest and that had got her all curious about it. I balked. I equivocated. (After all she wasn’t a romance reader.) In the end, I finally said yes.
She wrote me to tell me she loved it, in fact it had revived her marriage.

I was stunned. I was elated. I realized I needed to keep looking for a publisher and dug it off my hard drive. In almost no time at all, it was accepted by The Wild Rose Press and is coming out as an ebook this winter. It will be published in print in the summer of 2008.

If there’s a moral to this story it’s don’t quit. Books aren’t published unless they are finished (as in completed and done). They can’t be contracted if they aren’t sent to editors. And happy-ever-after doesn’t come easy, but it does come.