Warning--this post will be long, rambling and contains anecdotes that cannot be verified. However, if you persevere, you may learn something. Then again, you might just be bored stupid. Read on at your own risk.

I suspect a few people out there, hearing about my sale to Ace, are probably like, damn, I've been trying so long, and shit just happened so fast for her. Whore.

What ya'll don't realize is how long I've been doing this. So to put it all in perspective I'm going to tell you my (writing) life story. When I was in first grade, we had something called Career Day at school. We got to pick out what we wanted to do; they had cards with job descriptions on them. I picked out "freelance writer" because it was the only thing to do with stories. My teacher said, rather condescendingly, "That's not a real job, honey. Why don't you pick something else?" That should have prepared me for the row I had to hoe over the years. What can I say, I'm a slow learner.

Well, I never did pick anything else. When I was nine, I wrote my first "book." It was a Scooby Doo style story called "The Mystery of the Golden Doubloon." I won a contest at my school and went to a state-wide competition called The Young Authors Conference, where I met Shel Silverstein. He read to us from Where the Sidewalk Ends. That was the thrill of my young life.

Around junior high, I wrote a seventy-page novella in my Garfield notebook. It was a fantasy thing about a young man on a quest, accompanied by an elf, a dwarf, and he meets a beautiful maiden who can turn into mist when it rains. I forget what else happened, and my mother made me throw it away because the dwarf swore too much. Curse you, parental censorship!

I continued writing scraps of this and that as I went on through school. In tenth grade, I wrote my first novel, yes, an actual novel. It was 150 pages, typed on an old typewriter. I wrote it for one of those Sweet Valley High type lines. I forget which one. It was awful: a small-town girl meets a mysterious boy who works as the Winnie the Pooh mascot at Sears. Turns out he's on the lam because he ran afoul of the mob, and despite having led a boring life, our heroine turns intrepid adventuress, saving the boy numerous times. I wrote a wonderful letter to the editor along the lines of "I love your books! I'm a teenage girl, so I am sure teenage girls will love my book too!!" I was heartbroken when they sent me a form letter, and I felt betrayed when I discovered teen books were written by OLD WOMEN. The horror! I stopped reading them in protest, but nobody ever asked me why. Huh.

My next attempt came when I was 19 and in college. I was studying English Lit, which mostly bored the crap out of me, but I thought it would teach me more about writing. I discovered romance novels about this time, Kay Hooper, Iris Johansen, and I ate them like Cracker Jacks. I thought, I can do this! How hard can it be?

Thus was born my deliciously bad Loveswept targeted romance novel. Our heroine, Skye, is a stripper / heiress. You see, she ran away from her father's oppressive tyrannical control to dance topless and make her own way in the world. Her father, being a Big Meanie, cannot allow her live her own life, so he hires former Black Ops Military man, Stone, to retrieve Skye. Skye and Stone, isn't it just too precious? Sparks fly immediately between these two. He is struck immediately by the need to possess her carnal innocence. Lots of melodrama ensues, and he eventually drags her back to her father's estate. More shenanigans, and then it's revealed that her father is a CRIMINAL. Long story short, Evildaddy goes to jail, Skye inherits what's left of his fortune, and Stone helps her set up a fund to save endangered wombats or some such thing. Isn't love grand? I called it Heaven and Earth. Because of their names. Get it?? Symbolism! Who says I'm not using my Lit degree. To my astonishment, Loveswept didn't buy it!!! I know, right?

Reeling from that rejection, I decided I wasn't meant to write contemps. By then, I had discovered historicals: Laura Kinsale, Kristin Hannah, Patricia Gaffney, Anita Mills...oh, swoon. Hey, this doesn't look so hard. I bet I could write one! Seeing a pattern yet?

So I wrote a dark, gritty historical romance I called Light a Candle. The hero was a tortured bastard son who inherited a title, when all he wanted was to be farmer and a poet. The heroine was a fabulously wealthy merchant's grand-daughter. Her father was a famous explorer, and they first meet when she's a girl, because the hero, Adam, comes to their townhouse to ask to examine some things in her father's collection. Her mother is mad and reclusive, so the hero feels sorry for the girl. They strike up an unlikely friendship that ends up ruining her reputation. I broke every rule with this book. I patterned it after Anita Mills's Autumn Rain but I didn't have the skill to pull it off entirely. I had the hero and heroine married to other people for a while but in love with each other. It was lovely in some ways, but horribly flawed. This book was the first "not bad" thing I wrote.

I was all of 21 years old. I bought a book with a listing of agents in it and started sending queries. Imagine my shock when I interested people at Jane Rotrosen Agency. They shopped it for me in NY. Yes, I was 21!! I received many compliments on my writing, but everyone felt the book was flawed. They asked me to send my second novel, so I wrote another one. This one had a heroine named Grania and a hero named Ravyn (yes, I was at the stage in my career where I thought it was Ultimate kewl to substitute a Y for other vowels at random. I'm just thankful I didn't catch Glottal Stop Fever along the way.)

Anyway, the hero came from a cursed bloodline, where he's doomed to marry a woman he hates, who will die in childbirth. He hires the heroine to catalogue his library. It was very prettily written, but the fine ladies at Jane Rotrosen told me it had two problems (a) it wasn't a romance because the heroine and hero don't spend enough time together and (b) it had no conflict. (They were right!) Being an inexperienced knobhead, I concluded the people at Jane Rotrosen didn't know what they were doing (because my book was GOOD, wasn't it?) I severed that relationship and sulked for a while.

After that, I had some babies and continued to write but I was afraid to show anyone anything. People were mean! And cranky. And terribly unfair. Thankfully, I got over this hypersensitive assclownishness.

My children were toddling when I finally sold my first book. It was "lit-ruh-chure." Boring, depressing, poetic, and it has a dreadfully sad ending. It sold like twenty copies, including people I know. I finally got my nerve back, though. And I had learned something: just don't give up, no matter what.

I sold two historical romances (though not that first flawed one). They received excellent reviews. Then the small publisher I wrote for went belly up and I never got paid. I felt like I'd been wasting my time.

Around then, I said "bollocks to romance, I'll write fantasy!" and I enrolled in the Online SFF Writing Workshop. So happened, Del Rey partnered with them that year. I won the Editor's Choice contest and wound up with a publishing contract with Del Rey Digital. That was my first experience writing on a deadline, and I am hella proud of Stone Maiden. I thought I had it made then. My editor loved me, and I expected a long and fruitful relationship. Then they let her go. My new editor barely knew my name, and thus my career ended before it began.

But I didn't give up. I decided to give contemporaries a try since the historical market seemed to have dried up, and I was mad about the whole fantasy thing. I finished Guide in September of 2005. I once again began to query this time, but I was determined to find an agent. No more peddling my own stuff.

The search went slowly, and it nearly drove me mad, but in May, I signed with an agent. It took her four months, but she eventually pitched Guide to nine major publishers for me. I received some lovely rejections, including "send me your next book!" but they were rejections just the same. This wasn't the one for NY.

I was way frustruated by this point. I can write, can't I? I'm getting better every time. Why aren't I selling?

Some of the joy went out of writing too. I started to feel like, "What's the point? Nobody but me will ever read this."

To counteract that feeling of futility, I went with it. I said to myself, "Okay, if nobody but me will ever read it, then I'll write for ME." I sat down at the keyboard with an utterly blank mind, no plot, no idea, no characters, and just began to WRITE. It was...magical. I wrote and wrote and wrote.

The end result was Grimspace, the book Ace bought.

I had to switch agents to make that happen, and I'm glad I did. See, when I finished Grimspace, I knew it was "the book" for me. I just had to find an agent who knew it too. That's the moral of this story. Believe in yourself. Find someone else who believes in you. And you can do this.

And if you think this was quick for me... well. No, not from inside. But I wanted it so badly that I just never stopped trying. You shouldn't either, if this is what you want to do. No matter what my first grade teacher said, this is a real job. And it's what I do.