The Road to Getting Published (Part 1)

So, a little more about getting If Wishes Were Horses published.

I’ve been writing since I was 12, when I sat down and wrote two novels straight through. I guess it never occurred to me at that age, that I couldn’t do it. Now, I’m not saying they were readable LOL - but I sat down and wrote them.

Then, I stopped writing, oh I was always thinking about stories in my head, but that’s as far as it went. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I thought I better start writing some of these stories down. It’s a heck of a lot easier to sit down and write a novel at 12 when you seem to have no fear of anything, than it is at 28.

So I started (trying) to write. I wrote lots of beginnings. For some reason always made it to chapter 3 before I got stuck, gave up, and moved on to something else which I would write up to chapter 3. I have a load of beginnings in a file somewhere. This carries on for a while. I picked up Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten in 2001, and join her message board. I’m not sure at what point she started her writers group but eventually I pluck up the courage and join - and write a lot more beginnings. You can see I follow something of a pattern.

Then in 2005 things start to happen. Firstly I take part in NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) along with a load of other people from the OWG (Online Writing Group). I manage to write my 50,000 words and complete a story. Admittedly it’s not very good - though I think there are some good ideas in there - and I probably wouldn’t show it to anyone on pain of death. But it proves I can write past Chapter 3. Kelley has a short story competition on her site and I enter and get an honorable mention. I’m starting to take this writing thing a lot more seriously.
Angela Knight has a writing competition on her yahoo group. I enter that, even though writing an erotic scene probably has to be one of the most nerve wracking things I’ve ever done. On the basis of that story, I’m invited to join a crit group and I start learning fast. I take part in NaNo again in 2006 and this time manage to finish something that I’m actually very happy with, and hope to revise at some point.

I’m invited to join another crit group - yep I’m a sucker for punishment - and start working on If Wishes Were Horses. For NaNo 2007 I work on this story and for the first time don’t complete NaNo, but that’s because IWWH is not a novel it’s a novella. I finally manage to finish something that I want to submit to a publisher. IWWH goes to both my crit groups, and gets a lot of rewriting, then it goes to a beta reader.

Everyone in my crit groups seems to be getting published. Part of me wants to work on IWWH even more, to get it perfect. But another part of me thinks, nothing is ever perfect. So I take a deep breath, write a query letter and submit to Samhain.