Getting THE Call

I wrote twenty novels in the process of trying to be a nationally published author, each of them bad and unpublishable for different reasons, until I finally worked on the manuscript that became The Monster In Me, published in 2002 with Holiday House. I took it to a writers’ group and I still remember the author who told me about the first chapter I read, “this isn’t the first chapter of the book. This is the last chapter. You have to go back and write everything that happens to get the character to this point. That will be a book.”

I resisted this for several weeks until I realized that it might be true and it was definitely worth trying. So I threw out almost every word of the book and started over, driving toward that first chapter, which was now the ending point. And I sold that book. All on my own. I sent it out to “Acquisitions Editor” because that’s what the Writer’s Market book I’d taken notes on from the library told me to do (this was in the days before the publishing world was so digital).

I got the call from the publisher as I was living in my parents’ basement with four children under the age of six, babysitting two others of similar age, trying to get out of $100,000 in credit card debt by living on WIC and about $100 of food money each month. I knew from the ID that the call was from New York and I’d never had a phone call from that area code before. Trembling, my voice shaking with hope, I answered. When the editor on the phone identified her name and that she was calling from Holiday House, my heart started beating even faster. I listened to her offer of publication and told her that I was in the midst of getting an agent and would have that agent contact her to iron out the details, as I’d been coached to do by multiple published authors.

Then I called the one agent who hadn’t turned me down yet and told him about the offer. He didn’t even have that book in hand (because I had so many written that I’d sent him a different one). Eventually, he called me and made me an offer of representation. That was a much longer phone call. It was so long that I ended up making my way to the furnace room, closing the door on the six kids who were supposed to be taking naps, and keeping the light off while I tried to pretend that I wasn’t there while also having one of the most important business conversations of my life. Somehow, I managed to do impossible things even back then.