My Journey to Publication, or Why You Should Never Give Up (Part Two)

(This blog post ended up being pretty long, so I decided to separate it into two parts. You can find Part One here).

It’s kind of amazing to me, looking back, that I didn’t give up after those first three manuscripts. Baby author me was, apparently, very resilient. That resilience would be tested with my fourth manuscript, a young adult steampunk romance. I absolutely loved my fourth manuscript when I started querying it in 2012. For the first time, I felt like this was it. This was the one. For the first time, I had truly discovered my voice, and my writing had gotten strong enough to support it.

I don’t remember how many agents I queried with my fourth manuscript, or how many requests I received, but it was a lot more than I had received in the past. I also made it into two contests: Baker’s Dozen, hosted by Miss Snark’s First Victim, and the very first Pitch Wars, hosted by Brenda Drake. I believe the number of total requests (from contests and querying) was somewhere near twenty, and all of them were from dream agents, including the incredible Andrea Somberg, who would eventually become my agent, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.