As Dames Devon and Jackie mentioned, for the next couple of weeks, we dames are writing a series of “How I Got Published” stories. And as my fellow dames have so wisely pointed out, no two paths to publishing are the same.
For instance, several of my fellow Dames took a more academic (and probably better informed) approach to their quest for publication. They studied their craft with formal classes, workshops, and seminars, which probably gave them the leg up on things like story structure and pacing, which I learned (and am still learning) from trial and error.
I hate to say that I stumbled into publication in ignorance of the “rules” because that’s not entirely true. But it’s not that much of a stretch, either.
I’ve been writing ever since I could hold a pencil, and I suspect I was narrating stories aloud even earlier than that. In junior high, I kept spiral bound notebooks full of what I now understand were character back stories. In high school, I learned to type and for Christmas my sophomore year (1993?), my dad gave me the Brother word processor I’d begged for. (We never had a computer—that’s how old I am and how poor we were.) And with that word processor, my output quadrupled, at least. I had files. I had notebooks. I had short stories. I had the long, rambling bit of a teen novel I never finished and later lost completely, except for the pages I’d printed and scribbled on, which I still pull out occasionally for a good laugh.
That same year, when I was fifteen, my sophomore English teacher recommended me as an applicant to the Tennessee Governor’s School for Humanities, one of several awesome state summer programs for gifted and talented students. (It’s free. High school students, see if your state has a program like this!) I filled out the application, including a writing sample, and to my complete shock, I got in.
So I spent one month of the summer between my sophomore and junior years (1994) living in a college dorm with the other GSH students, studying, partying, and generally pretending I was grown. And taking the only two creative writing classes I’ve ever had. It was awesome. At the end of the month, one of my short stories was chosen to be “published” in the GSH anthology, a paperbound POD product with value to no one but those published in it. I’d never been prouder of anything in my entire life. My piece was an exercise in magical realism, in which a little girl is beaten to death on her way home from the library, but rises above the whole thing to watch it happen.
Yeah. I’ve always been like this. My family is baffled. 
But those two GSH creative writing courses remain the only formal training I’ve ever had. I’ve never entered a contest. Never taken a writing class. Never attended a workshop. I didn’t even join RWA until I’d already written four novels and was querying agents for Stray.
But to back up a bit, during college (I majored in English) most of my writing time was taken up with papers. Lots and lots of papers. I started a couple of short stories during my senior year (2000), but never finished any of them.
Then came real life. I had bills. I had rent. I got a job. And I forgot I was a writer.
I didn’t remember who I really was until the spring of 2004, when #1 noticed that I wasn’t very happy and reminded me that I was always going to write a book. He practically dared me to really do it. So I did.
Over the next ten months, I wrote three novels (2 high fantasies and Stray) totaling around 370,000 words. While I wrote the first two, I had no internet connection. No one other than #1 knew I was writing. I knew nothing about genre expectation or narrative structure and I had no idea there was a “wrong” way to write a novel. And I didn’t care. I just wrote. And wrote. And wrote.
By the time I finished the second novel in the fall of 2004, we had reliable internet access for the first time in my life. So I went online to find out how to get my novel published. That’s when I realized I’d need an agent. And that getting published could take years. And that the two novels I’d finished were not marketable. No one was buying 1st person high fantasy with worldbuilding problems and disjointed plots. Who knew?
So instead of querying those books, I started a new novel, which would become Stray. And once I had a complete rough draft, I started researching the publishing industry and reached out to an author whose books I liked—a rising star who would soon go supernova. But when I met her, she only had two books out, and she was kind enough to show me the ropes. She read Stray a chapter at a time and showed me what I was doing wrong and how to fix it. Then she recommended me to her agent, and I thought I’d found the shortcut to a career in publishing.
But as it turns out, there is no shortcut. Her agent rejected me, because the book didn’t move fast enough for him. I was devastated—for about a day. Then I rewrote the opening to include the very first fight scene in Stray and I started querying for real, the hard way—through the slushpile, with no connections or insider information. That was the fall of 2005, around 16 months after I started my first novel. As I queried, I was revising Rogue, my fourth manuscript.
Six weeks into querying, I got a call from Miriam Kriss, the nineteenth agent on my top twenty list. She’d read my partial and wanted the rest of the manuscript. I emailed it to her. Five hours later, she called and offered me representation. That was Thanksgiving weekend, 2005.
She asked for minor adjustments (there was no sex scene until she suggested it) and we waited out the holidays, then sent the manuscript off to six publishing houses on Jan 2, 2006. The first offer came in eleven days later, on Friday, Jan 13th, 2006. (And now Friday the 13th is my lucky day!) Within a couple of weeks, we had three more offers. And that’s when things got crazy.
On the last day of January, 2006, I accepted an offer for a 3 book deal from Luna (I would soon be moved to Mira). Stray came out June 1, 2007, and since then, Agent M has sold ten more books for me, for a total of 13 books in 3 different series, both adult and YA.
And after all of that, I remain convinced that while classes and workshops and writers groups work (and work well!) for some people, I would never have powered through those first three manuscripts in so short a time if I’d been worried about breaking “rules” I didn’t even know existed. Or if I’d been buried by the avalanche of querying details so many beginning writers obsess over online and in writers groups.
I found and developed my “voice” in fiction because in the beginning, that’s all I could hear. And when you’re starting out, listening to your own voice is just as important than listening to everyone else’s.
