Cue my mother saying, “Do you have to talk that way?”

“It’s New York!” I held up a hand in complete exasperation to silence her and answered the phone.


Because I knew what this meant. We’d been on submission for a little over three weeks. We had interested parties. This was the call. F&%# me, indeed.

When my agent started talking, I got nervous. When I processed what he said, my heart dropped like a stone. “There’s always a time when an agent needs to have a serious talk with an author about the way things are going.”

Cue heart, dead in my breast, unwilling to beat anymore. I was being fired. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such disappointment.

Then he kept talking.

“This isn’t one of those times. Congratulations! We’ve got a deal.”

My heart began to beat again. At a rhythm I didn’t know it was capable of. It was beating so hard that I didn’t hear a word that was said next, and had to ask my agent to repeat himself. That’s when I heard what he was really saying. Not just a book deal. A three book deal. With the house I wanted. Mira was my first choice for a number of reasons. I respect the team, the house, their writers, the direction they were going with the thriller genre. I loved the editor. This was beyond dream come true land.

And they were offering me a job.

My agent went on to talk about release schedules, secured my assurance that I could write two books a year, then said he was going to go back to the table and call me later. I was brimming with tears at this point, and I think he heard them, though I was desperately trying to play it cool. “Go call your husband,” he said. “Congratulations. You’re a published author now.”

Good grief, I’ve got goose bumps sitting here typing this, eighteen months later. I still get choked up at the thought of what happened next. I had the most visceral and unexpected reaction. With my hand still in the air asking for silence, my parents practically falling out of their chairs to hear the news, I called my husband, and broke it to all three of them at the same time. “I’ve got a deal,” was as far as I managed to get before I totally, completely and utterly broke down.

I’m not much of a crier. You need to get me pretty damn riled up to see tears. Strong, strong emotion is necessary to get me going, and I rarely cry if I’m not provoked to frustrated extremes. As I broke the news to my husband, the one who worked his butt off so I could stay home and follow this dream, I flat out wept.

I know myself pretty well. I’d run through most of the permutations of how I would react to the news that I was going to be published. This wasn’t on the list. Which made it all the better. I didn’t know just how much I loved writing, didn’t know how much of my heart and soul I had invested in this endeavor until that moment. I’d been rather nonchalant about the whole thing up until then. The reaction made getting the deal that much more special.

And then we drank a load of champagne. Which made everything even better. Then my agent called back the next day to say he’d renegotiated the offer. I did a very, very happy dance. We then proceeded to drink another load of champagne.

Once the deal was done, I talked to my editor for the first time. An hour later, when we got off the phone, my sides were aching from laughing so much, and I knew I had a home.
Don’t ever give up on your dreams, my friends. They really do come true.