This week is book launch for Even in Darkness and after Passover and preparing a seder for 14 people, what else would I be doing at 11:00 at night but hopelessly trying to organize both the computer and wooden desktops to trick myself into feeling like it's all going to roll out beautifully!
Then I found this... a snippet I wrote almost exactly a year ago, and which has rested on my desktop, always a click away from dismay and discouragement.
"It is the evening before a conversation with a publisher that I believe will lead to publication of the novel I have spent 13 years researching and writing. In the last four years I have pitched the novel to agents at conferences, tried forming connections with agents of writer friends and authors whose work is in the same genre as mine, and even won a contest with the manuscript. I have read thoroughly and kept pace with the shifting sands of the publishing world and succumbed more than once to the conventional wisdom that it's nearly impossible to publish, much less market un-agented manuscripts. I have kept the fragile joy of acquiring my late-in-life identity as a writer alive by working on a second novel, and by writing articles and stories. All the while, from deep within, the certain knowledge that I want my book published, and published the way I want it published, has thrust up like a longed-for crocus at the end of a bitter winter. There's still snow on the ground, but those green shoots are reaching through the rich soil I cultivated, and that crocus will bloom."
And it has! Thank you Brooke Warner, She Writes Press, the whole SheWrites community and all those who've accompanied me on this wondrous journey! The original version of this post appeared on SheWrites.com