A New Year's Resolution

The summer of 2010, I went to Hawaii with my mom and dad for a cousin's wedding. Lots of reading, no writing.

Then G and I went camping at Glacier. This is me at Teddy Roosevelt Nat'l Park.

Despite my travel time, I did do a quite thorough copy edit of the text over the summer. Wow, had I made mistakes. Once they were fixed, I made a plan for sending out three more queries. As the agents I was interested in noted that they preferred exclusivity, I decided to send out my queries one at a time over the course of the late summer and fall.

I heard back from all of them, but no one bit.

At Christmas, decided to get serious. I sent three more queries and gave myself the month of January as a deadline. If I didn't get an agent, I'd pursue some other path to publishing. Luckily for me, agent Sara Crowe at Harvey Klinger in New York asked for a manuscript. There was that thrill again.

Sara ultimately passed. So...

I made a resolution. For the entire month of February, I turned off my TV and devoted each night to figuring out what to do next. If you know me, you know this was not an easy task. I gave myself permission to watch the Superbowl and Oscars, but that was it.

I only cheated once the whole month. I researched self-publishing of all types (MN vanity presses, amazon.com's CreateSpace, lulu.com, etc.), read a lot of MG and YA fiction, and even started plotting out a new novel. I contacted self-publishing superstar Amanda Hocking BEFORE her publishing deal and she was helpful and encouraging.

Then I found Aaron Shepard.