You asked.

I've had three dreams come true in my life:

1. Becoming a teacher.
2. Marrying my husband.
3. Publishing a book (soon!)

That's the order those things happened, not the order of importance, by the way.

Okay, you wanted details...

Here we go. I'll interject a few delirious and ecstatic "Aaaaaaahhhhh!"s randomly, just so you can feel like my husband when he picked up my phone calls every twenty minutes after I got the email.

I'm trying to think how far to go back on this story. Um, I'll tell it all. Just skim if it bores you. It's not like I'll know. Unless you fail the quiz at the end.

I wrote and told all kinds of stories as a kid. That lasted all the way until college, and then it all became expository essays and literary analysis. Blah.

When I started teaching 8th grade English, I also got to build a creative writing elective curriculum from the ground up. As I wrote with the kids, I rediscovered that love for fiction and got some practice flexing my creative muscles. Every summer, I swore I'd start that novel I meant to write, and every summer I just spent recuperating from another year of teaching middle school and trying to gear up for the next one that always came too soon.

Then I got married, and then I got pregnant, and then I had a few months to sit around growing a baby and not going to work. And I had the kernel of an idea that never sprouted.

Baby G was born 18 months ago, and shortly after, I tried to lay down for a nap and I got this idea stuck in my head. I wanted to sleep soooo badly (I had a newborn. Remember that exhaustion?) but this little image wouldn't go away...a redheaded girl named Sandy. Something struck me as so funny about that. After fifteen minutes of that nagging, I gave up on my nap, dragged myself downstairs, and started my novel Click.

What a learning experience. I'll bore you with the details another time, but ten months and countless online classes, conferences, edits, forums, books, articles, drafts and more drafts later, I birthed a book. I sent that baby out to two publishers with fingers crossed, and...

Something crazy happened. I got two offers.

The first company, one I really like and respect, offered me a contract immediately. And I soooo badly wanted to take it. The other company asked me to wait on a decision about that contract so they could finish their review. And it's a really good company. So I took a gamble and agreed to wait. One verrrrrrrry long month later, Company B came back with their offer: they liked it, but they wondered if I would consider soem revisions and resubmitting.

So there was my choice: take the contract in hand from a company with a proven track record and a staff I really like, or rewrite and resubmit to my dream company at their invitation.

Oh, boy.

And I just realized how long this post is so I'll finish up tomorrow. . .