It's Here!

April is finally here, and along with it, my new book, The House of Secrets! Unfortunately, I was unable to celebrate appropriately, as the stomach flu invaded my house at pretty much the same time. I was mostly spared (so far anyway--fingers crossed), but with three kids in various states of sickness, I mostly spent the past few days heating up chicken soup and doing way too much laundry.

So, I'm now trying to get back into "writer" mode. I'm hoping to get something up here soon about how I started doing this in the first place, since I was always curious about how to get a book published before I did it myself. Here's one (obvious) piece of advice: Be persistent! I was going through my filing cabinet recently, trying to clear up some space, and I can across the manuscripts of TWO complete books that I finished and submitted and were rejected (some more than once). They're probably not very good (I'm afraid to read them again right now), and I know it was crushing at the time to have them turned down.

But now that I can take a longer-term view, I guess those books were practice runs. I never would have gotten my current book published if I hadn't written those first and learned what NOT to do.

That said, when I become a nationally famous author, maybe publishers will be lining up to buy these early manuscripts for a giant advance. I can dream, can't I?