My Blog Sabbatical Bears Fruit!

Dearest Readers,

I'm thrilled to announce that my holiday from blogging was not in vain! I've finished my first novel, Life and Its Side Effects. It's a contemporary young adult (YA) coming-of-age story that I like to describe as a cross between Are You There God, It's Me Margaret and The Joy Luck Club, with a bit of Sex and the City thrown in.

I've also been lucky enough to sign with the fantabulously smart, funny and passionate Jennifer Laughran of the Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

For those of you who don't know my story, here is my tale:

Once upon a time there was a girl who liked to read stories. She grew up into a woman who liked to write stories, but who also had an unfortunate aptitude for science. This was unfortunate because, as a result, lots of people encouraged her to become a doctor. It seemed like a good idea to help people and be gainfully employed, and besides, she told herself, writing was too hard anyway.

So she became a urologist. And because it turned out that she actually liked cutting people open, taking out their kidneys and bladders and sewing them back together, she was pretty happy. Until the day she had to go into the basic science lab for a year. Cutting mice open and sewing them back together actually made her bored and depressed, so she started reading a lot more stories. In fact, she even told some people she’d like to write a story of her own one day, maybe even one about a girl whose mother was a urologist. Most of her friends smiled and nodded when she said this. But one person frowned and shook her head, telling the urologist that she could never be a writer – that writing a book was a long and tedious journey and that she didn’t have the temperament to ever finish a book.

This made the urologist mad, and out of spite she started writing, forcing herself to be disciplined about it. Her first pages were of questionable quality, but she was determined to prove the mean person wrong and fulfill her dream of writing a novel.

As part of her writing process, she started to learn about the children’s publishing industry and joined SCBWI. Through SCBWI she met a sparkly new agent, whom we will call Agent Charming. After Agent Charming’s talk, the urologist pitched a one liner about her story, then called “Confessions of a Urologist Daughter.” Agent Charming very politely told her that the story sounded gross.
Four months later, after she’d written about a third of her book, she went to another SCBWI event that offered manuscript consultations. And guess who did the urologist's critique? None other than Agent Charming, who was intrigued and asked to see her full manuscript! The urologist was ecstatic and encouraged, but also a bit ashamed because her novel wasn’t finished yet.

For the next year, the urologist went back to cutting people open and taking out their diseased organs. It was actually pretty fun (but time consuming), so she didn’t get to write very much. Then she got pregnant. This scared the urologist, who assumed that having a newborn would not be entirely conducive to novel-writing. So she worked really hard, finished her novel, and revised it a couple of times.

Just before she started querying (two weeks before she gave birth), she bid for and won a critique by a soon-to-be-published writer. The writer loved the urologist’s first chapters and actually sent a note about them to her agent – who turned out to be...Agent Charming!

A month later, after the birth of a 7lb 8oz baby, a revision and a small amount of drama prompted by a competing offer, the urologist and Agent Charming exchanged their vows over the internet, witnessed by the soon-to-be-published writer and assorted members of SCBWI and the Blueboards. It remains to be seen whether they have issue.