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It’s real this time. No more harsh critiques to stop me in my tracks. Just my full manuscript in an envelope, nicely printed out along with a query letter and synopsis. Today, it will go out to New York, priority mail. Then, it’s out of my hands for a while. It could be six days or six months before I hear back from them. How scary is that? Let me tell you: It’s terrifying! The most I can do is pray that it’s a quick turn-around with a happy result. And in the meantime, write the next book! Zombies come…

Being able to handle criticism is not an easy thing to learn. You would think that after more than 14 years of it, I would be used to it by now. And maybe back in the day when I was at Vandy, I was better at it. I can’t say for sure because 10 years ago doesn’t come back with that kind of emotional clarity. (At least not when it comes to criticism.) I remember being told that I was terrible as a singer, and I remember having people say things in critique like “If I sang that song, I…

The ending stages of getting a novel out are much more tedious than I expected. Once the book is finished (all three drafts or however many it took), there’s still the query letter and the synopsis. Not to mention figuring out the packaging itself. A synopsis is basically a 3-5 page summary of your entire novel, but it’s not that easy. It’s also got to show your “voice” as a writer and make the editor or agent reading it hunger for more. Until you’ve tried to do it, you have no idea how hard it is to shorten a novel…

Writing a synopsis is not as easy as it sounds. It’s so difficult to summarize the important elements of my 170 page novel into only 3 pages! Unfortunately, it’s a necessary part of my submission package, so I have no choice. The novel can’t go out until the synopsis is written. I think one of the main things that makes it difficult to write is that I love my book for all the little things. All those magical little moments that come together to make my story special and different, sure. But I also love all the pages in between….

I can’t believe the time has actually come to do a final read-through of my manuscript. It has almost taken me this entire year to get this story down on paper, and as novels go, it’s very short… a mere 49,000 words. But I’m proud of every single word, because it came from a place of creativity inside of myself that I always knew I had but never before had the courage to explore. Writing a romance novel, specifically for Harlequin, has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember. I think the very first one…

Yesterday I was listening to iTunes on random when a song from the Sex and the City Movie soundtrack came on. I know I must have heard this song a thousand times, but for some reason the words never really clicked with me until yesterday. It won’t let me embed the video from youtube, but here is the link, the song is called “It’s Amazing”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XDxhDbtDak Here are the basics of the lyrics. It will be obvious why they mean so much to me: Do it nowYou know who you areYou feel it in your heartAnd you’re burning and wishingAnd…