An awesome publishing moment

Getting my first book contract has ushered in a number of very awesome moments.

One was seeing my cover in printed form (it is even prettier in person!)

One was seeing my first pass pages:

And one, I’ll discuss below.

You see, I had this weird quirk most of my life, in that I was always, always secretive about writing.

I started writing for fun quite early, and it’s mostly due to my older sister. She was always writing something. I wanted nothing more than to be like my sister, so I started writing a lot, too, and I learned to love it as a kid. The thing was, though, I was also very embarrassed about it for some strange reason, and I still am not sure why….

My first book was this fifty-seven page epic in fourth grade with some girl named Greta and some curse involving a dragon. I had it all printed out at one point, but then I started worrying someone might see it and read it, so I ripped it up and threw it away, and just preserved the electronic copy.

In fifth grade, I wrote a prequel to that story, starring a Prince named Alexander who was cursed to turn into a dragon (as mentioned in the first book). I failed to tie this prequel in any way to the prior story, apart from mentioning the dragon curse thing… But I was fond of it, and it was long– sixty-something pages. I was very impressed with myself. But again, I hid this from everyone, and made sure never to print out the pages for fear they’d be read. Why? Who knows, because my parents would just have encouraged me. I guess it was just my thing, and my thing only.

Sixth grade was the first kind of public story I wrote. This was a prequel to the previous prequel, starring a guy named Joseph, who was supposed to be an evil tyrant who caused the whole dragon curse to happen in the first place. I failed to ever get around to including the actual dragon curse, but I worked long and hard on this story of an antihero. That same year, we were assigned a big class project, so I decided to use this book as my project.

The problem lay in the secretive nature of my writing. I’d tell my parents I was doing a project, but they saw no proof whatsoever of it. My parents would ask again and again as the deadline approached whether I’d done anything with regards to my big project, and I always assured them I had, while refusing to produce evidence. Since I was not the most diligent student at this point in time, my parents finally demanded proof. I very reluctantly printed out the story and offered it up to them so they could see the first chapter.

Just FYI, the story went like this: There’s a prince named Joseph hunting in the woods. He gets attacked by a bear and kills it. He finds its cub, and raises it as his best friend. The bear sleeps in his room and everything. One day, the evil queen and king decide they need to kill Joseph (I did not understand primogeniture yet), but they can’t get to him without killing his bear first. So they get him drunk and kill his bear, so they can better go about assassinating him. Joseph realizes they killed his bear and takes horrible revenge. He beheads them both. This part of the story ends with Joseph clutching a head in each hand, standing up on top of a hill in the sunlight, and declaring, “NOW I AM KING!”… And that was the end of chapter one.

My parents kind of looked at each other, and saw the number of pages, then were like, “Er, okay… You were working on something, after all.”

Not talking about my writing became a sort of habit. I can only assume now, in retrospect, that when I began pursuing publication, I didn’t want to share word of it in case I failed. But I did not; I got my book deal the last week before graduation from my Ohio grad school. It was a big Friday night for me, because that whole week had been an explosion of e-mails as my agent communicated with publishers and communicated with me, and Friday we got offers, and then that Friday night, I accepted one from Katherine Tegen Books.

It was kind of bizarre making that long-awaited Skype call to my parents on a friend’s computer to break years of silence about the writing thing, but… well, it was finally something to discuss. I got to tell them three things all at the same time:

1) I’ve been writing books for many years now (and this is my seventh)

2) My book has just been picked up in a three-book-deal with Katherine Tegen Books

3) This figure X is my advance

It was an awesome phone call to make. It was the absolute perfect end to years of not talking about it. It was even better being able to share what I’d written with them for the first time.

So, yeah. Awesome moments.