If you follow me on Twitter–which you should, by the way–this is Not News. Because Twitter knows all, my friends. Twitter knows all. 

THE SHORT VERSION:

I recently signed with Jessica Alvarez at BookEnds!

THE LONG-ASS TL;DR VERSION:

So according to Liz, I must write everything down, lest I forget it in my old age. 

Which I’ve been meaning to do, but then didn’t, because edits and work and tiredness.

It’s strange, because there was a time in my life in which I dreamt about writing a post like this, where I would gush and fawn and maybe post a bunch of animated GIFs. 

(This was back before posts made entirely of animated GIFs were ubiquitous. Before there was a Tumblr. Back when I had to walk uphill both ways in seven feet of snow to mail my query letters.)

And I haven’t lost that excitement, really. It’s just now there’s less dreaming and more doing, and I find I like the doing more than the dreaming, prefer the getting shit done over talking about shit on the Internet.

My point is, it’s something I wanted for a very long time. Something I wanted to happen, and thought maybe might happen, if I was lucky. And then as time went on, it became something that might happen one day. With another edit. With the next book. Until finally it became something that probably wouldn’t ever happen at all, and could I be OK with that. 

So when it did, I kind of staggered around like a newborn foal for a while. Because is this real life? What does it mean?

And also I had edits. But anyway.

ONWARD! TO THE INFODUMP!

I have always wanted to be a writer. Always. There was no fallback plan. No safety net. I was not that girl. I should have been that girl. I strongly encourage anyone who is not that girl to become that girl. Or boy. Because being A Writer or An HR Supervisor is a much smarter move than being A Writer or Else. 

Because the sad truth of the matter is, being A Writer is easy. Being A Professional Writer is fucking hard. Being A Professional Writer Who Makes Enough Money to Pay Her Bills is damn near impossible. 

So have a safety net. Pad it with as much Fuck You money as you possibly can. Be A Writer and Something Else. Just do.

Anyway, so I’ve always been a writer, often to the exclusion of everything else. And save an awkward couple of years in my late teens in which I gave up punctuation and decided I was destined to be a slam poet–shut up–I’ve always wanted to write books. Books about princesses. And hot guys. And billionaires. And sometimes aliens. Because that’s my jam. 

I sent my first query when I was fourteen, after reading IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. I’d read in Seventeen magazine about how she had written FORESTS when she was thirteen, gotten an agent, sold the book, become A Published Author.

Before this, I did not know how books got published. I remember asking my fifth grade teacher once, and she told me that publishers in New York hire writers to write their books, and that since I did not live in New York, and since I likely would never live in New York, I should probably be a nurse instead.

But here was a girl my age who did not live in New York and who had published a book. And if she could do it, I could do it. 

Probably.

So I sent out queries. Really awful queries. About a book I hadn’t even started. In which I tried to sound like a confident grown-up but instead came across as a pretentious asshole. 

And I sent these queries to everyone. Everyone. Like Curtis Brown. The same (Albert) Curtis Brown who died in 1945. I queried him.

And everyone rejected me. Even Curtis Brown.

Because they were smart.

FLASH FORWARD 15 YEARS:

By the time I began querying PLAYBOY SHEIKH, the category romance that led to an offer of representation, I had queried eight projects, and had reached a plateau in which I wasn’t getting a lot of constructive criticism, but I also wasn’t getting any offers.

The last project I’d gone out with, a YA light sci-fi, which went out in 2011, garnered a lot of interest, but yielded no results. A good portion of the agents who read the full didn’t even respond, not even after nudges. Those who did enjoyed it, but not enough.

And I won’t lie, I kind of died inside a little. Or even maybe a lot.

So at the suggestion of a friend, I switched genres. Because I still wanted to write. I just didn’t want to write YA. I wanted to write something that made me happy. Something that didn’t put the taste of failure in my mouth every time I looked at it. 

That something was romance.

HOLD ON, IT’S GETTING GOOD

In September, 2014, I entered SHEIKH in So You Think You Can Write, Harlequin’s annual writing competition. It completely shitbombed in the contest, didn’t even crack the Top 50. 

But I got a full request from an editor who seemed enthusiastic about the story, plus a few full requests from agents who had been scouring the contest for new talent. 

I’d never given any thought to trying to find an agent with a category romance. And in fact, I’d kind of given up hope of ever finding an agent for anything. My experience, especially with my last YA, had soured my expectations. Finding the right agent was something that happened To Other People. But not something that happened to me.

So I took to my support system, my friends Liz and Carol, and annoyed the shit out of them with my ambivalence, until finally I decided to go ahead and submit.

REVISION HELL

Jessica had had the full of SHEIKH for a couple of months when I received a revision letter from the requesting editor at Harlequin. 

I emailed her straightaway and asked if she wanted to read or wait. She asked how long it would take to do the revisions. I told her a couple of weeks.

And the devil laughed. Because he knew, Tumblr. He knew.

A couple of weeks came and went. I kept working on my book, which kept falling apart like the green fairy’s birthday cake in Sleeping Beauty. Seriously, the more I tried to fix it, the more it fell apart. Like trying to tape together a sinkhole.

Jessica emailed again, asking how those revisions were coming along. 

“I’ll be done this weekend,” I said. Because I hadn’t yet stared into the gaping void of a plot hole in chapter fourteen. Hadn’t yet realized my protagonist had no goal, motivation, or conflict. Hadn’t yet realized my new ending made my beta readers want to set the book on fire. 

We corresponded a couple more times, and on Tuesday she emailed to ask if I had time to speak with her about my book. 

It took me three and a half hours to write a 21-word email basically saying, “Sure.”

THE CALL

Jessica called on a Wednesday morning.

I was so nervous I accidentally took one of my cat’s valiums instead of a Benadryl, which is a bad thing because valium makes me super anxious.

And I was anxious enough as it was, more than a little convinced she was calling to list all the reasons why she couldn’t represent my work, why I should not be A Writer and should instead be Something Else. 

“But why would she do that?” Carol asked. “Why would she waste your time–and hers–to call you up to tell you no?”

“I don’t know!” I told her. “Why do I write bad fan-fiction or read dinosaur erotica? Why did I binge-watch the entire series of Sister Wives when it was on Netflix? People sometimes do things that don’t make sense!”

So for the first half of our conversation–well, for all of our conversation, best I can recall, but definitely the first half–I was a rambling, wheezing, neurotic mess, jittering around my office like a cracked-out mudskipper, answering her questions rapidfire and super-thoroughly, like I was trying to ace an oral exam. 

It was as though my brain liquified every Wikipedia entry I’d ever ready and spewed it out of my mouth. I was shaking so badly–from the nerves and from the valium–that when she asked if I had any ideas for future projects, I couldn’t read the paper I’d scribbled them on. At one point I referred to myself as the Cristina Yang of writing. And fuck if I know what that even means. 

Then she said she was calling to offer representation, that she enjoyed my book and had been looking for something like it for a while now. And I choked on my spit a little. 

Because in addition to No Backup Plan girl, I am also Chokes On Own Spit girl. And, apparently, the Cristina Yang of writing. 

I still had other fulls out, so I told Jessica I would be in touch with her after I had made my decision. She answered a few questions, sent over the agency contract. And I just kind of sat staring at the wall for a while. Because what the hell just happened?

MORE WAITING

What followed was the Longest. Week. Ever. 

One of the reasons I had not seriously considered querying this book at first was because it appeals to such a specific audience, even within romance. Not everyone likes billionaires and sheikhs and tycoons and royals and oh my god how can one not like these things? But a lot of people don’t. At all. 

But I could tell Jessica loved those kinds of books. Like, seriously, full-on, gimme gimme gimme kind of love. I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine and he shall be my Squishy kind of love.

And I wanted that. I didn’t always know that I wanted it, didn’t always know that was an option. But I did, and it was, and that was all I needed to know. My mind was made up. 

I’M SO COOL I’M ICE ICE BABY

I emailed Jessica and asked if I could speak with her again. Another 20-word email that took 4 hours to write. 

I went through and removed exclamation points. Didn’t want to come on too strong, appear too eager. What if she’d been on cold meds last week, changed her mind once they’d faded from her system?

Be cool, Chokes On Own Spit Girl. Be cool.

She called, and I broke the ice with the first question on my list.

“What happens if you…expire prematurely?”

A legitimate question, one that looks fine on paper, but tastes all sorts of wrong coming out of one’s mouth. Even if one is the Cristina Yang of writing.

“Not that I want you to, or anything,” I clarified. “I mean, I’m not trying to put that out there, into the universe, or anything. I’m just curious, like, what happens….if you expire. Prematurely.”

But at least I did not choke on my own spit.

We went over a few more things, things which did not have to do with either of our untimely deaths, and then finally, I said, “So…I guess that’s it. I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page before we made everything official. If you haven’t changed your mind, I mean.”

“No, I haven’t changed my mind!”

“Are you sure? Because you can. I mean, if you want to. You still have an out.”

Because I am also that girl.

“No, no, no,” she said. “I still want to! I was worried you were going to say no!”

We finished up with a bit about where we go from here. She gave me some tips to help me revise my book. I promised her I would never send her dinosaur porn or books about sentient penises. (Some promises are made to be broken.) We agreed that the character of Maggie on Grey’s Anatomy was a Very Bad Idea. Also, sheikhs are hot. 

THE AFTER

We got off the phone, and I texted a few people, played on Twitter, went back to edits. Waited for it to sink in, to feel real. 

Because it didn’t. It still doesn’t, really. 

I’ve been doing this on my own for so long that sometimes I forget that maybe I don’t have to beat my head against the keyboard when something isn’t working, or fret about what to work on or when to submit or who to submit to. Now I have someone in my corner who’s willing to help when I need it. 

And that’s kind of cool.