Never before had I been offered a contract and advance before a word had been written... I went home and began writing 'Julie of the Wolves.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.
I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
Over a four-month period, I sat down and wrote every day. And then there was a novel, and all of a sudden, there were agents and offers.
What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader's part.
I think I made my first short fiction sale in 2005. I had been writing unsuccessfully before that.
My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.
The first thing my writing ever earned me wasn't an advance on a book; it wasn't a fee for an article or anything like that. It was, in fact, a residency at Hedgebrook Farm.
I sold my first short story while I was home on maternity leave, then began working on novels. Since I was reading and enjoying romance novels at the time, the first two unpublished manuscripts I wrote were both romances. I sold my third novel, 'Call After Midnight,' to Harlequin Intrigue after submitting it unagented.
I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.