It’s Really Happening!

It’s been a full week since I was able to announce that my first novel, in what I am hoping turns into a series of novels, will be published in 2025. While the announcement was only seven days ago, I’d known about the offer for a few weeks but needed to finalize paperwork before making the announcement public. That time of holding in this secret was so hard! From the moment I received the call from my agent, I wanted to start shouting from the rooftops, “I did it! I finally did it!”

This novel and the characters in it came about in late 1997 or early 1998. I wrote about a dozen chapters and then put it away. Life was too busy at the time to keep going with the project. I had mom stuff and work stuff and general life stuff that didn’t leave me with a lot of down time. I told myself I would make time for it eventually. I told myself that when I finished it, I would submit it and spend as much time as needed to make it into the world of traditional publishing. It wasn’t called that back then though. E-books, Nooks and Kindles, and the ease of self-publishing didn’t really exist back then. Even after that creation, I held out for the traditional route. It was the promise I’d made to the younger me.

The project was put away until around 2008, when I pulled it out of the closet after I’d started a different project that is still unfinished today. My husband told me to finish it and when I did, he was supportive of my idea to submit it in an agent search. And when that search didn’t go anywhere, he signed me up for a writing conference in Las Vegas in 2014. I made friends, received some great advice, and met the woman I knew I wanted to be my agent. There was just something about the way she spoke about her authors that put her excitement about them on full display. She was passionate about helping writers get their stories out there, and I knew I wanted to work with her.

I contracted an editor, made some changes, and then sent a single submission to the agent I wanted to work with and waited. Months later, when she posted to Facebook that she was reading my manuscript, I didn’t sleep! When she called while I was at work and said she wanted to represent me, I cried. I didn’t realize how long it was going to take us, but I knew in my gut that Liz was going to be the one who helped get me to where I wanted to be as an author.

We started down the road together, but it wasn’t meant to be easy! Life got in the way for both of us and I ended up putting the project down again to deal with some personal stuff. We received a few rejections with some great feedback once we were back on track in 2018 and I went back to rewriting. We were cruising along, my agent had her own book released and we were going to fly out to California to celebrate the launch with her, have dinner, talk next steps, in March, 2020…You all can guess what happened next.

When life got back to normal, we had another phone call and Liz had re-read the edits. She had an idea. “I wouldn’t ask this of every writer, but I think you can do it.” I think she knew that little bit of outside confidence would encourage me to tackle what she thought would improve the story. I can’t tell you what her idea was because that would be a huge spoiler for something not yet on the shelves, but I can tell you it was a big deal and a big change and a lot of work. But she was right, I did it. It does make the story better and the fact that we landed an offer on our first round of submissions after making this huge change says she was 100% right. And that I was 100% right in trusting her to be my agent.

So, yes, making my big announcement last week took us ten years to get to. Mine isn’t the average publishing story and I can’t say there weren’t moments throughout the process that I didn’t consider giving up. There have been story changes and name changes, edits, rewrites, and tears. But answering a phone call on a Friday evening and hearing my agent say “Hey, we’ve got an offer on your book” instantly made all of what we went through to get here worth it. I can’t wait to share the life of Detective Cassidy Cantwell with the world and make my twenty-one-year-old-self proud. With a little more luck, I hope to write many more Cassidy Cantwell stories for all of you.