Return to the Scene of the Climb

For someone who’s been writing all her life, I haven’t been writing for very long. Meaning, my degree is in Journalism. I’ve been doing lots of technical writing for non-profits, and some ghost writing for authors and communicators, but writing fiction? Commercial fiction? That was a whole new animal. I knew I had a lot to learn. About craft. About the industry.

I took a step that has proven to be so crucial. I joined the Romance Writers of America (RWA). And then went local, and joined the Georgia Romance Writers (GRW). I found a roomful of folks in the same boat as me, though at different stages of their journey. Sorry for mixing metaphors, but you get it! We could relate! 🙂

I had only been a member for a few months when our annual Georgia conference rolled around, Moonlight & Magnolias – M&M. It was October 2012. I had entered our contest, The Maggies, and had OK scores. Some judges said something I would hear a few times. “It’s not really a romance.” They say that because of some of the…ahem…difficult relationship decisions my heroine makes. More on that later…I understood. It broke a few traditional romance “rules”. I knew it was a love story, though. There was a movement, maybe subversive (Ooh, I hope so! I’ve always wanted to be subversive!), to toss some of those rules. And all the rules-tossing stuff I was reading, I loved!

Anyhoo…someone asked if I was going to pitch at M&M. I had NEVER pitched before. It hadn’t even occurred to me. That’s a thing? At the same time, I love public speaking; love communicating. And I loved my characters like family, so just do it, right? And then I heard so many around me talking about how nervous they were. How they hated pitching. How they might throw up.

I was definitely not taking this seriously enough.

Then I asked myself. “Self, what do you have to lose?” There was lint in people’s pockets that had been around longer than I had. And it’s just one step. It may not take me much of anywhere, but it was an experience I wanted to fully embrace. Fully experience and learn from. So this ladder was in front of me. It’s my career. It’s my dream of becoming a published writer. There was this low-risk rung right in front of me. All I had to do was take that step.

So I did.

I sat down with an editor from a major publisher and told my characters’ stories. I don’t know what she thought of me, or of my little spiel, but she asked for a full.

And God bless the GRW member Pam who was managing the pitching schedule, because she squeezed me in with someone else. An agent. Again, pitched my lil heart out, and SHE requested a full.

Scrub forward to THIS year’s M&M Conference. 2013. I’m sitting in my first break out session, giving half of my attention to the presenter (sorry!) and the other half to my phone because I’m responding to an email. Only a year later, in the exact same conference, in the exact same month, in the exact same hotel – I was emailing titles back and forth with my agent Nikki Terpilowski and my editor Latoya Smith, of Grand Central. Titles for my first THREE books. The same two ladies I pitched to just one year earlier at this conference.

Huh?

I nearly got emotional in the middle of that very helpful break out session. Taking that one step can change your life. Joining RWA and GRW seemed like small steps, but they laid the foundations for me to complete and polish my book. Pitching seemed like a small step, but I could not have known how it would propel me forward. How it would change my life.

What’s your ladder? What’s your low-risk rung? What’s your STEP?

TAKE IT!