|
Hello Readers!
This post is more of a road to publication piece, so all about me—my road to publication. If you want to skip to the bottom to the book recommendation, feel free. (Although the book recommendation is also about me. And five other Dragonblade Publishing authors.)
After the release of The Queen’s Daughter in 2010, I tried writing more YA medieval historical fiction, without success. And to make things worse, my agent retired and I had to return to the query trenches.
Eventually, I did sign with a new agent to represent Prized, a YA retelling of the Arthurian Romance Erec and Enide by Chrétien de Troyes. This strange but charming adventure tale of knights and ladies, King Arthur’s court, giants and dwarves, and, of course, true love, has captivated me ever since I read it in college. My very patient new agent worked with me as I rewrote and rewrote the story. It went out on submission and then…it didn’t sell. This is one of the most discouraging parts of the writer’s journey, because it feels like you come so close, but still end up throwing in the towel.
I moved on to another project, but it became increasingly clear that I didn’t have a YA voice. My agent and I parted ways amicably, and I gave up on YA to concentrate on writing for adults.
All this is to say, persistence is key. And so is flexibility. I had to be willing to take something I’d worked on for years, and stick it in a drawer. Or a folder. I’ll spare you the list of projects in the drawer. Suffice to say, it’s a pretty stuffed drawer.
So what next? I drifted away from the Middle Ages and started researching the turn of the twentieth century in the U.S. Primarily, this was the result of a growing fascination with Dr. William Stewart Halsted, the first surgeon-in-chief at the newly established Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was a brilliant experimental surgeon, a teacher who trained the next generation of surgeons in the U.S., and the male lead in a poignant love story, but the clincher was—he was a cocaine and morphine addict. This book was a lot of fun to research. (I learned how to do archival research!) And I fell in love with the love story between Halsted and his OR nurse. When the book was written, I started the query process again. To be continued…
The advice given to every writer is to start your next project while the very slow wheels of the publishing world turn. While waiting, I decided to try something new. Writing Romance.
I jumped back across the ocean to England, and landed in the Regency Era. In my last newsletter I wrote about my love for reading historical romance. I love writing it just as much.
The first romance I completed was Counting on Love. I entered the manuscript in Dragonblade’s Write Track Competition-2023, and it won the Grand Prize. (Wildly exciting and validating. I needed the encouragement.) The prize came with the opportunity to publish the novel, if it was part of a series. Which I was then determined to make happen. Writing a series is very different from toiling over a single novel for years as I was used to doing—a subject for another newsletter.
However, another benefit of the prize was the chance to publish a novella in an anthology with the other winners. Hurray! This meant I got to rework Prized once again, and this time, see it published. If you like shorter, novella-length fiction, and want to sample the work of six romance authors, check out Tales of Timeless Romance. (Available only on Kindle, or read for free on Kindle Unlimited.)
|
