I recently found out that a big hairy audacious dream of mine just moved one huge important step farther towards reality: my novel Ice Will Reveal has been accepted for publication by Hadley Rille Books, with a tentative publishing date of early 2013. I am, how can I put this...oh hell, why not: verklempt. It’s actually kind of hard to describe exactly what it feels like, but I kind of want to, which is why it’s taken me a week to actually blog the good news. I know...metaphors to the rescue! Ok, then: my feelings about finally becoming a published author are a spicy, complex goulash: there’s a good solid base of lots of “squee! I’m gonna be a REAL author!” type excitement, of course, and a decent amount of pride; but also a good splash of anxiety (will anyone buy my book? will anyone like it? will anyone even read it?) and a generous dollop of trepidation around all the new things I’ll have to learn (marketing, self-promotion, blablabla). Spicing it up further are a sprinkle of validation and relief that the next phase of this long journey has finally been achieved, mixed with a pinch of amazement and a bit of self-chastisement at how long the process has taken so far and how much longer it will yet take before the book is printed and in a bookstore or library (or someone’s e-reader). And I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that there’s also a zest there of nervousness about going the independent small press route instead of continuing to try to break down the doors (or glass ceilings, or whatever) of the big publishing houses.

But enough about goulash, let’s switch metaphors, shall we? (It’s my blog, I can do what I want to!) It’s been such a long and winding road to get to this critical juncture of “yay, someone wants to publish the novel I wrote”, and it feels important to take a look backwards and see how I got from “writer” to “author”. So let me lay out some of the journey, both as a hopefully useful reminder for myself and in the vague hope that perhaps it might be useful to other people for whom this kind of project doesn’t go quickly or easily either. (I know I suffered at first, and still do in my more gloomy moments, from the “I must not be very good at this if it’s so hard and it takes so long” syndrome. It’s a sucky syndrome. Try to avoid it.)

Ice Will Reveal (which used to be called something else entirely until it was pointed out to me that I’d unintentionally used a double entendre as my title—doh!) is my first novel-length work. In fact it’s so long, it’s practically two novels, but that’s a whole other blog post. It’s my newbie novel, my MFA equivalent: it’s the project with which I learned how to elevate my craft from “unconsciously incompetent with the occasional flash of competence” to “conscious incompetence with slightly more frequent flashes of competence”. I started writing it sometime around the end of 2003, triggered by a series of entertaining emails back and forth with a friend of mine where we each recounted the ever more epically heroic and over-embellished achievements of our individual characters from a D&D game we were playing (yes, yes, I’m THAT kind of geek...but in all fairness I can say that this novel bears only the very smallest resemblance to either D&D or to that long-ago game). At that stage in my life, I had a fairly absorbing day job as a Licensing Manager for a calendar company and was the mother of a young preschooler. I didn’t write very often or very much at a time, but I was determined to try to produce a longer piece of work. I had always been interested in and good at writing (in fact, I started out as a Creative Writing major in college before getting wildly distracted by academia for oh, roughly a decade), but I’d never written anything as big as a novel before (though I’d read a half a zillion of them already.) In what I used to sarcastically refer to as “my copious spare time”, I started reading books about writing and participating in online critique groups. Eventually I found myself some in-person writing buddies too, all of which helped a lot.

This went on for a bit, then in 2005 I had another baby and most everything went on hold for a while until I regained some kind of equilibrium (albeit a precarious one). I still tried to write here and there, and continued to learn by critiquing others’ writing, but it wasn’t until I finally decided, almost as a dare to myself, to apply for the week-long Viable Paradise workshop for speculative fiction writers in late 2007 that I really began to make progress. That workshop, in addition to its really useful information and mentoring from all sorts of fabulous professional speculative fiction writers, gave me the opportunity to seriously (re)claim my writerly identity, and find a tribe that still supports me to this day (and which directly led to this publishing opportunity, as a matter of fact, but more on that in a minute). A few months before attending VP, I also decided to open a web solutions company with my husband, which then led me a few months after VP to quit my day job (at that point I was a salesperson for a financial education company) and spend most of my free time learning how to be an entrepreneur. It was hard to be both a fearless creative entrepreneur with two small kids and also find time to write, but I kept plugging away, even if it was only in bursts. I started going to cons (Worldcon and World Fantasy, especially), and tried to create writer retreats for myself and friends, and that helped keep the writerly identity alive, even if my pace of production stayed somewhat glacial.

Somewhere in early 2009, one of my friends from VP (hi Kim!) had started publishing with a small press (yep, this is where Hadley Rille Books comes onto the scene), and wrangled an invitation for me to submit something to an upcoming fantasy anthology: Renaissance Festival Tales. How could I resist that subject? I couldn’t. So I took some time out to plan and write what turned into a novella, “Cupid for a Day” which appeared in the Renaissance Festival Tales anthology from Hadley Rille Books in 2010. (I still really like this story and the characters, and have actually toyed with expanding some of it into a novel someday. If you're curious, you can now get that story for $.99 on Kindle by clicking here. But I digress.)

I finally finished the full draft of Ice Will Reveal on the last day of the World Fantasy Convention at the end of 2009 (two years after VP for those keeping score). Then I took a year to edit it. At the end of 2010, I sent it to Hadley Rille Books, because after we’d worked together on “Cupid”, the publisher (hi Eric!) had expressed interest in seeing the manuscript of my novel. While waiting to hear what Hadley Rille thought, I also got together a query letter and synopsis (a much harder process than it sounds), and started doing some sporadic querying. (I say sporadic because just like the writing, there were bursts of querying, and I was distracted by other life drama for much of this past year.) I got a couple of requests for partials but mostly got “no’s”, and then I got tired of the querying process and let the thing languish while I turned my attention to a new novel (because I wanted to see if I could do it again, but take fewer years to finish this time). I noodged Hadley Rille a couple of times (politely!), and was told to hang on, it was still in the “to read” pile.

Then finally, just a few weeks ago, I was doing that anxious writer chat thing with my friend Kim, who now works as an official (albeit wildly underpaid) fantasy editor at Hadley Rille Books, wondering if the long response time meant “no” and whether I’d get an answer by the time the World Fantasy Con rolled around at the end of October. Kim decided to use her special noodging superpowers to get the book out of the slush pile and into the hands of the other official (and probably also wildly underpaid) fantasy editor, Terri-Lynne (hi Terri!). Terri read the book in a week and had a pow-wow with Kim and Eric and then with what felt like supersonic rapidity, I finally had the pleasure of opening an email that said “yes, we’d like to publish this.” (I paraphrase.) SQUEE!

So all that took approximately 8 years, from humble beginning to gleeful SQUEE! Of course, this isn’t by any means the end of this book’s journey. Far from it. Still to come are a round or twelve of edits, ranging from major to nitpicky, and the fiddling with cover design and cover copy and marketing blurbs and all that. Plus copyedits and the creating of ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) to be sent out for reviews. Eventually, just over a year or so from now, there will be an actual book. Then there will be lots of other marketing hoo-ha (which I will need to get savvy with, stat), and eventually, approximately 10 years after starting the damn novel, then, maybe, oh how I hope there will be, THEN there might even be some sales and some appreciation from readers. I’m still dreaming of that day when I get my first fan letter or at least my first positive review on Goodreads from a stranger.

It’s been a long, winding road to get here, and there are still miles to go before I sleep (to paraphrase a couple of way more famous writers), but I am feeling pretty good at this moment. I like this feeling of validation. I have toiled, yes: but I have not toiled in vain.

Onward!