A Good Year

In my last post, I wrote how determined I was for 2013 being a good year. I was going to slow down on my story publications and try to get my first novel published, but most importantly, I was determined to make this a good year for my family and to solidify decisions I had made last year. More so, I wanted to help someone I've admired my whole life be free from someone I've only recently become unchained from--and it's been a promising few days so far.

I'm getting everything ready for her to come out here and thinking of different things we can do to get her mind off things. It's going to be a good time, and I can't wait for the burden to be finally lifted off of her and for her to be free to laugh and be herself again. Only so many more days...

On another family front, my sister's husband is finally, finally home from more than a year in Afghanistan. I wrote about his deployment here and since that post, the deployment got very bad with him losing much of his unit, including a best friend, to enemy fire, so I am so glad that he is safe and at home. My sister and I are very, very close and I would always just stand in awe of how she wrangled her three kids by herself with him gone. She has always been extremely capable and self-sufficient, but sometimes, she boggles my mind in how strong she is.

Since he's been home, my sister has been sending me pics and videos of him and their girls, and it is just precious how he is with them. One of the pictures was of the girls in dress-up princess costumes and they had had their nails painted. He was holding their tiny hands in his, admiring the colors, and the look on his face was so genuinely full of love and affection that it made me choke up. So happy that they are all finally together again :)

On yet another front, and this was completely bonus, I started sending out queries to literary agents the day before yesterday. My husband had helped me with the query letter that I had agonized over for hours and after tweaking it just a little bit more, I finally clicked "send" on emails to some of the best agents in the country.

It was a complete shot in the dark, because everyone I've talked to had always told me that trying to get an agent for a literary novel was just impossible and would only destroy any kind of confidence I had as a writer. It was better to just publish with a small press, because writers don't make money anyways, and so on and so on. I was fully prepared to go with a small press and had one picked out that I would send it to later in the year, but I wanted to just try the agent route. I would never know what would have happened if I never tried, so I did.

And I admit, it was a little daunting seeing everyone's guidelines--so many agents took less than 1% of submissions, many received 50,000+ queries a year, and so on. I fully expected to wait months to hear back, if at all.

And then my email inbox chimed....two agents wanted to see the full manuscript! One agent had written within fifteen minutes, another within two hours! I was beside myself with excitement! So after checking and rechecking my email to make sure I wasn't imagining it, I sent them the full novel.

And then, just when I thought the day simply couldn't have gotten any better, Weave Magazine sent me an email asking to publish my story, "Queens and Kings." It will be out in July of this year.

So much wonderful news...and it's only a few days in the new year. If it's any indication of how the rest of the year will go, 2013 is going to be truly amazing.