So…long time no blog! I’ve been scrawling some messy, terrible poems and revising a manuscript I finished like a year ago and, also, unfortunately, doing a lot of Not Writing. But an exciting email landed in my inbox this week, and it reanimated my long-dead urge to blog. If you happen to be a writer from the Ready Chapter 1 community, welcome! You might’ve seen said email, but for anyone else, here’s a screenshot excerpt:
“Want to be like Maria?” Boy oh boy did that line give me a hearty chuckle. My whole life, I’ve been asked the much more appropriate, more Sound-of-Musicky question: “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” Being like Maria? That…is not something I can in good conscience recommend. In fact, if I had one word to describe what it’s like to be Maria, that word would be DIFFICULT.
Maybe I’m wrong, but from the outside looking in, it seems like most of y’all are able to, like, go places and do things, to interact with each other, to understand what you’re feeling and why. And you do it all so effortlessly. I observe, amazed. Those are all simple things that, for me, are a struggle. Quite honestly, I spend a lot of time and energy trying hard NOT to be like Maria.
But this week’s lovely email message is inspiring me to take a break from beating myself up to celebrate and share some secret good news.
You may already know this, but the book publishing industry exists in a strange, parallel universe to our own, where time passes more slowly. MUCH more slowly. It’s not unusual for writers to get good news they can’t share publicly for months or even years. In fact, it’s the norm.
Technically, I’m still not supposed to be talking about it…but since the Ready Chapter 1 message came out…and since this little corner of the internet is pretty obscure…I’m going to spill the tea.
Last spring, I entered Ready Chapter 1’s brand new Middle Grade Legends Challenge.
The contest was free to enter, with entries scored by other writers, but before you could post your work, you had to honestly critique a certain number of other people’s entries. There’s a rubric for numerical scores for plot, voice, dialogue, etc.; a mandatory comment section; and a whole system behind the scenes to thwart bad-faith scoring/numbers gaming. Over the course of a couple months, I posted, rated, and posted, till the first five chapters of my book were up.
One of the many neat things about this contest is you were encouraged to revise your entries based on the feedback you received. Writing is rewriting, and rewriting is my favorite part of the whole writing cycle, so I took advantage of that, making plenty of changes along the way.
Sometime in July, I found out I was one of fourteen finalists. In addition to our first five chapters, now revised and polished, we had to put together an elevator pitch, jacket flap copy, and a synopsis of the full plot. These submission packages were read and critiqued by Fred Koehler and Sarah McGuire, the brilliant creators of Ready Chapter 1, both of whom are widely published authors with a ton of industry knowledge. In August, those packages were sent to Bushel & Peck, a children’s book publisher offering a book deal to the winning entry.
On a rainy Monday in the middle of September, I got a call from Fred at RC1. This is a brand new contest, and I wasn’t sure of next steps. By this point, I’d read some of the other finalists’ entries, and they were excellent. I’d also done a deep-dive on Bushel & Peck, who publish beautiful, wonderfully written books, but I felt like my manuscript probably wasn’t literary enough to fit their list.
So I expected the Fred call to be a kind, personal way of telling me I didn’t win. A teeny, tiny part of me dared to hope I’d hear him ask to read my full. What not one single solitary molecule of my being expected to hear were these strange and magical words:
“Bushel & Peck want to publish Serenity.”
(Serenity is short for my manuscript, currently titled Serenity and the Soul in the Wall.)
In denial, shock, utter disbelief, I texted my husband and critique partners. They did a lot of excited squeeing, which woke me from my coma and allowed me to indulge in some excited squeeing of my own. I exchanged some emails with the editor and publisher at Bushel & Peck, and we had a virtual meeting in mid-November. It couldn’t have gone better. They were lovely and answered my long list of questions with patience, kindness, and encouragement.
The actual publishing contract is still in the works which, my published writer friends assure me, generally takes eleventy billion years to finalize. I’ll post updates as I get them, but for now, I never said a peep and you know nothing. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!
But if I were going to give one tiny piece of advice, it would be to keep writing and keep reading, even when everything feels hopeless and it seems like a waste of time. ESPECIALLY when everything feels hopeless and it seems like a waste of time.
Because our stories may be the only things that can save us.
Maria Linn 