MY PUBLISHING STORY

Photo by Patrick Tomasso

When I first started writing PARTING THE VEIL, way back in August of 2018, I had no idea it would become my debut novel. I was merely writing for the pleasure of writing, after many years of not writing…at all.

When we moved to California from Missouri over three years ago, I left behind a career as a successful, award-winning wedding photographer. Anyone who has ever been a small business owner knows that when you make a cross-country move, you usually have to begin again and regrow your business from the bottom up. Rebuilding my photography business was going to take time. I took weekend gigs shooting weddings under established photographers in the area to make connections, and focused on getting our daughter settled in our new home.

I soon discovered I had time to write again, and a latent passion was rekindled.

I’d always wanted to write a suspenseful historical Gothic romance, in the vein of the books I read as a teenager, whiling away the long summer afternoons daydreaming about crumbling mansions and stormy English landscapes. It was time.

Two months after I started writing PTV (then called THE GLOAMING VEIL), I finished my first draft on Halloween. It was the first time I had completed a novel-length manuscript, and I was ecstatic. With my husband’s support, I decided I was going to make a go of things, and dedicated myself to chasing my lifelong dream of being a published author.

I let that first draft sit for a month, and then dove back in for revisions. And hoo boy, I did not know what I was in for! Friends, it was a mess. As most early drafts are. So I sat down, did more research, wrote a lot more words over the next few months, polished things, and sent it out to a few friends who volunteered to read for me. While they enjoyed the book, and gave me some excellent feedback, I still had the sense that something wasn’t quite up to par with the manuscript. I needed professional help to bring it to its full potential. So I entered RevPit in the spring of 2019.

RevPit (or Revise and Resubmit) is an annual contest made up of freelance professional editors who graciously volunteer their time to donate a full developmental edit and query package critique to the winners of the contest. (You can read more about it here. The next round of RevPit is coming up soon!). After researching all the wonderful editors, I chose to submit my manuscript to Maria Tureaud and Jeni Chappelle. It was the first time I’d ever participated in a writing contest, and I waited with anticipation to see if I would get a request from either one of my chosen editors.

When I got my full request from Maria, I couldn’t believe it at first! I was over-the-moon ecstatic. An industry professional wanted to read my novel?? Wow. I never even thought it would get that far! So with shaking hands, I sent my manuscript for her consideration, and waited. In the meantime, I cultivated some great friendships among the other participants, and even found my future critique partner and beta readers through the contest.

On the day the contest winners were announced, I painted my nails to quell my anxiety, and watched the winners pop up on the RevPit Twitter feed. I was so happy for the winners—some of them were my friends—but with a sinking feeling, I realized I wasn’t going to be one of them.

That turned out to be the best thing possible for me. Because I needed time. Lots of time.

Time to grow. Time to learn. Time to do a COMPLETE REWRITE.

Maria sent me a very kind and encouraging email, highlighting the things she loved about the manuscript. She also outlined its over-arching problems—the main issue being that I had somehow crammed three novels into one manuscript. It was a veritable clown car full of words! Each act was like its own mini novel, and there needed to be a unifying thread to connect things. I needed to simplify. I emailed Maria and asked if I could hire her. She said yes. I withdrew some of my savings and paid for a full developmental edit.

I’m not going to lie—the next few months were grueling.

Maria’s brilliant but brutally honest edit brought up my craft issues with pacing, characterization, and plot. Before I touched the manuscript again, she recommended several writing craft books for me to study—especially the EMOTIONAL WOUND THESAURUS. Using the thesaurus, I did a deep dive and really honed in on what I wanted my main character, Eliza, to overcome from her past and how I wanted her arc to play out on the page.

I took an entire month and wrote behind-the-scenes character sketches for all my main players, explored their wounds and their desires, and refined the plot with Maria’s help. She’s an excellent brainstormer, and we had so much fun hashing out the possibilities for Eliza and Malcolm, until I got to the heart of the story I wanted to tell:

“Emotionally scarred American heiress with a scandalous past comes to England for a fresh start. Meets equally emotionally scarred and scandalous viscount who lives in the ruined mansion next door. Lustful shenanigans ensue. The villagers clutch their pearls and monocles are dropped. But Eliza doesn’t care. She does what she wants, hahaha. <insert record screech> But, oh my God, what? Sexy edgelord Malcolm is potentially as bad as the gossips say he is? AND his house is haunted??”

I mean, there’s a lot more to the story than that. But.

With the help of my amazing critique partner Thuy Nguyen, who was in a similar post-RevPit situation with her fantasy manuscript, we rewrote our respective mss, swapping chapters twice a week. I sweated. A lot. Finally, in late 2019, I had a polished manuscript primed for a final round of critique. I sent it out to some of my writer friends and a sensitivity reader…and people were like, THIS IS GOOD. YOU SHOULD QUERY IT.

So, I did. The first round was encouraging. I had a 50% request rate. I queried in very small batches (4-5 agents at a time) over several months and waited for my full requests to come back before querying more.

Narrator: They all came back as vague rejections.

I went back in, refined a few more things, and sent out another batch of queries. My request rate went up to 60%. I was onto something. You can see my successful query letter here.

With the encouragement of friends, I decided to throw all my money on the table. I workshopped some pitches with Maria, then entered September 2020’s PitMad. As I watched, filled with what I can only describe as a stunned sense of wonder and elated horror, my pitches went viral. I ended up getting a total of 26 agent likes from all three of my pitches when all was said and done, although I only had time to query 19 of them.

The next few days were a whirlwind I can barely remember.

When I got a message from Jill Marr of SDLA, one of my top agent picks, asking when we could chat, my heart nearly jumped out of my chest. Could this be The Call? I DM’d Maria and Thuy and the Office memes started flying! It was happening! When Jill called me the next day and told me how much she loved Eliza and the book, I could only listen while making small animal sounds and mouth breathing into the phone. I don’t even remember what I said. I just know when she offered rep, I cried.

I immediately notified all the agents who still had my manuscript and gave them time to read. I received another offer of rep a few days later, and really took a lot of time with making my decision, because both agents were solid and savvy. When I emailed Jill to tell her I wanted to accept her offer, I went out that same day and bought my very first bottle of truly expensive champagne to celebrate.

Jill reviewed the manuscript again with an editorial eye, and told me it only needed minor changes, which we covered over a phone call. I got right to work on her edits, and a couple weeks later, I was ready to go on submission to editors. Jill kept me informed during the whole (nerve-wracking) process. When I got the email with a blazing INTEREST FROM LAKE UNION in the subject line, my excitable heart did a somersault. Lake Union publishes some of my very favorite historical fiction authors and I was super thrilled when Jill told me the amazing Jodi Warshaw wanted to talk.

We set up a call, and Jodi and I clicked immediately. Her vision for the manuscript and where she wanted to take it perfectly aligned with my own. And best of all, it only needed very minor edits to get it ready for publication, meaning it could go to print this year instead of next! When my contract came, I could hardly believe it was real. More celebration! Happiness!

And then the bottom dropped out. The very same week in December that I signed my publishing contract, my husband started experiencing indigestion that wouldn’t go away. When he came in one night, winded from the same walk he made every evening, I knew something was wrong. This was in the middle of our most severe COVID-19 surge in SoCal, and the last place he wanted to be was the hospital, but after I threatened to call an ambulance, he finally agreed to go to the ER. Sure enough, his labs indicated he was having a heart attack. When the second stress test came back, it showed two major blockages in his coronary arteries. They took him to the cardiac cath lab immediately, and placed a stent to unblock the fully occluded artery. He came home on Christmas day. The main thing we celebrated on NYE was the fact that he was still here. I haven’t stopped being thankful, since.

While I’m busy (your time-management skills after you sign your book deal will become priority number one—trust me) things have stabilized and I’m getting into a schedule with my writing, and treating it like a real job. I’m a bit of an outlier in that my first novel was the one that got me my agent and sold to a major publisher. I have a lot to be thankful for, and luck is definitely a big part of any traditional publishing success story. But it also took a lot of work over three long years, and so much help, to get here.

So, here’s my advice: Take your time as you polish and prepare to present your work to the world. Learn writing craft. Query in small batches. Tweak and refine as you go. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from critique partners and beta readers. And always, always keep learning.

PARTING THE VEIL will be released by Lake Union Publishing on October 15th, 2021