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No problem?

I quickly discovered my new characters, especially the hero, didn’t talk to me as easily as the characters on the show. Gee whiz. Writing was a lot harder than I thought. But I persevered. I was and am a stubborn gal and that is definitely a quality needed for any gonna-be author.

When I had perhaps a hundred and fifty pages of my wonderful tome, I sent it off to a cyber-pal who’d given me a lot of good comments on my fan fiction. She quickly confessed she was a multi-published author and wanted me to know that before I trusted her with my manuscript.

Dang! So that was the reason she wrote the best fan fiction I’d ever read.

Undaunted I sent it anyway. When I received it back, it was covered in red ink, but I learned so much from that critique. That’s when I learned about POV glitches, head hopping, etc. She also recommended I join Romance Writers of America, which I’m happy to say I did in 1999. I completed that first whopper of a manuscript (142k words in the first draft) in the fall of 2000. By that time I already knew it was too long, so with the help of a critique group I managed to whittle it down to 128k and started sending query letters and receiving rejections just as quickly.

In the meantime, I started book two, aiming it at Silhouette Intimate Moments. I finished it in only five months and sent it to an editor with whom I’d had an appointment at a writer’s conference in Memphis. I received my only snarky rejection as in “looking for interesting heroines”. And if you aim a book at such a specific publisher and line and they reject it, what the heck are you going to do with it? At 72k words, it was too short for mainstream romantic suspense and there weren’t any other category type publishers.

This is when electronic publishing caught my attention. One of my local chapter members, who’s now famous beyond all our dreams, Sherrilyn Kenyon, published with an electronic publisher, in addition to her then contracts with Avon, and she said it was a viable venue to try.

So I did.

I looked around and checked with a couple of authors at Wings ePress and submitted LOVE ON THE RUN. I was beyond thrilled when some weeks later, the executive editor e-mailed me with a contract. She praised my clean manuscript and my characters who “jumped off the page” for her.

Okay, so there wasn’t any advance and if I wanted to see my book in print format, I would have to send them a setup fee of ninety dollars, but that didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. I would have a chance to work with a real editor and improve my work.

It was a nice relationship. The editor is a lovely person. I learned I could meet deadlines promptly. Actually it was the publisher who learned I could because I already knew I could meet deadlines. Other than Sherrilyn, I was the only e-published author in our chapter. Sort of a second class citizen, but a citizen, nonetheless.

LOVE ON THE RUN released in May of 2002. I hadn’t given up dreams of a New York contract, so partials of my long, long SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS were still languishing at several publishers. It took Berkley two years to reject the requested partial and the Pocket editor three years. By this time, SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS was already published by Wings ePress in August 2003. I followed with another romantic suspense, THE MAN FOR THE JOB, in September (I think) 2004.

And then I started TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, aiming again for Silhouette Intimate Moments.