One yes at a time: in which our heroine becomes, officially, a novelist

And now, some words that I have been waiting to say since I was eleven years old:

I am going to be a published novelist.

I have a book deal.

Actually, I have a three-book deal. Aven has been sold to DAW Books and will be appearing on shelves in 2017.

I cannot give enough thanks and praise to my agent Connor, who took a chance on this project two years ago, shepherded me through several rounds of edits, and spent pretty much all of 2015 pushing it on sub. It’s been wonderful working with him on every stage so far, and I can’t wait for the next phase. ❤

I’m also thrilled to be working now with Sarah Guan, my editor at DAW. My spare moments have already been filled with tackling the first round of notes she’s given me so that I can polish Aven up into a tighter, leaner, brighter-burning book.

It’s been a few weeks since I found out, and honestly, I’m still having trouble believing it sometimes — but seeing that notice from Publishers Marketplace sure helps! When I got the call from Connor, he had to repeat himself three times before my fuzzed brain was able to comprehend what he was saying. It’s true what they say about that call — for someone who’s dreamed of this and worked for this for so long, it’s a life-changing moment, but something so big and so hoped-for turns out to actually be a little hard to wrap your head around.

I also want to say this by way of encouragement to other writers: Aven started life in 2011 as a Nano project. It was a way of rededicating myself to fiction writing after grad school and the first year of my day job had taken me utterly away from it in favor of academic writing. But I pinned myself down and committed to the project. I wrote, I revised, I did that some more. When I thought I had something good, I took a chance and pitched to a couple of agents at a con in 2012 — and then realised I still had a lot of work to do. I revised for another five months. I spent 10 months querying before Connor took me on in October of 2013. And then I revised some more. And then we went on sub. And then we decided to revise some more. And then it went on sub again. We had some disappointments along the road, and I’d been — as readers of this blog will know — working on some other projects so that I’d have something else ready if Aven had to go on the shelf. I’d been preparing myself for that; I had resigned myself to the probability, so I can quite honestly say that this success came when I absolutely least expected it.

My point in this is: Yeah, it’s easy to get discouraged when you see how easy success seems for other writers. Of course, it never is, for anyone, but it can certainly look like that on social media — the writer who gets an offer from the first agent they query, the project that gets snapped up by a major publisher after being on sub for a week. When you’re in whatever trenches you’re in — drafting, revising, querying, subbing — it can seem impossible that you’ll ever get to share in that joy that others are celebrating.

But all it takes is one “yes”. Well. One yes at a time. A series of one yeses. One agent to say yes. One editor to say yes to the agent. One publisher to say yes to their editor.

The most important one, though? Is the very first yes — when you decide you’ve got a story to tell and dedicate yourself to telling it.