Okay, my own blog. Not for the group but about me (and anyone who wants to read about me). Not that I really need something else to spend time doing... but who knows, maybe my own journey will help someone else out there. You too can ramble on aimlessly on the road to publication.
Truthfully, I started this journey three years ago almost as a dare from a group of fantastic third graders who are now in sixth grade. As I hounded them day after day to revise, they told me that there was no way a "real writer" could spend that much time on revision. Not if they had written a whole novel. I took the challenge. Forty-four pages later I had written, what I thought was, a real novel. Ah, if I could only go back and laugh at the writer I was then. If I only knew that true revision didn't take weeks or even months, but years at times. Especially when you've written a forty-four page high fantasy novel for middle-graders.
Completely over-confident, I googled agents and started to send my novel out... to one. I read the submissions guidelines, no multiple submissions. I waited three months to receive my first self-addressed-stamped envelope in the mail. I opened it and found nothing. The envelope appeared to be empty. I opened it a bit wider and there it was, my first rejection, on a small strip of paper cut apart from other rejections. I would like to tell you that I still have that rejection (something to show when it HAPPENS), but, it is hard to keep a piece of paper that small. It disappeared one day, never to be seen again. But don't worry. I have plenty more to share.
Stacy, I love how you got started in writing. I was also one of those people who never dreamed it could take so long to revise a novel. I think most people don't really understand how much work is involved in making a book into something worth reading.
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