FROM IDEA TO PUBLICATION, A LONG, CONVOLUTED, AND OCCASIONALLY AMUSING, JOURNEY

It’s been five years now since I sold my first book to Harlequin Superromance, but the idea had been rattling around in my brain for many more. The story was about this young widow who came from England to St. Louis, Missouri with her two teenage daughters, one an asthmatic. Although she’d never had any nursing experience, she ends up working as a nurse’s aide, struggling to make enough to pay the rent. The girls are homesick and always begging to go back to England, but she’s determined to make a new start.

The idea had been rattling around for ages, because it was based on my own life. My mother was the young widow, I was the asthmatic daughter making her life miserable by constantly whining to go home. I figured it had plenty of dramatic potential, but I couldn’t seem to move beyond the part where the three of them are standing on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth watching the Statue of Liberty hove into view. And, since that was my opening scene, I knew I was kind of stuck.

Then I saw a Saturday class on how to write a romance novel. I hadn’t thought of my book as a romance, mostly because my mum had been too preoccupied with whiney teenager daughters to think about love affairs, but I decided it was worth checking out. The instructor was a guy who wrote under a female pseudonym. Romance writing was easy he assured us. Nothing to it. He churned out three or four books a year and got to write off exotic vacations and expensive meals. You just put a guy and a gal --he used those words-- in some sort of situation where they start out hating each other and end up in bed together. Well, actually not a bed. Make the love scenes steamy, he advised, and anywhere but a bed.

Okay, I was hooked. My husband and I got into a huge fight that night because he wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about my fledgling, but bound to be lucrative, romance writing career, in fact he was downright skeptical. I dropped the subject. He’d change his tune once the once the checks started rolling in and we were jetting off to Europe on the proceeds.

But back to the young widow. The instructor said it was essential that the hero and heroine meet on the very first page, so I took her off the Queen Elizabeth and put her in a hospital working as a nurse. All the patients tell her what a lovely English accent she has. I make the hero a doctor and, since I needed them to hate each other, I have him come from Northern Ireland.

Sparks soon fly. As soon as he hears her accent, he makes some snide comment about the English; she shoots back with something snotty about the Irish and they’re off. Later o, the asthmatic daughter becomes another source of conflict but they work that out and pretty soon they’re making passionate love on a hospital bed. Then I remembered that beds were out, so I moved the scene to an empty office and the top of a desk. Pretty soon they’re making love all over the place -- never the bed though-- and then he asks her to marry him so they can all start a new life together, free of Anglo-Irish conflict. The end.

Fantastic and I’d whipped it out in an afternoon. It was all I could do not to gloat. And then I decided to do a word count. Ten thousand words. That’s all? I wasn’t sure how long romance novels were supposed to be, but I had a niggling suspicion they should be longer than this. Around that time I joined RWA and, soon after, a critique group. Although I got a lot of positive feedback, no-one in the group seemed to think the Anglo-Irish thing was sufficient conflict which was pretty much the same response I got from the Harlequin editor I’d met at a conference. She suggested I read some of the books in the line I was targeting.

I would have, but I was too busy playing God with my characters. First I made the young widow a divorcee with a jerk of an ex-husband, then I traded the whiny teenage daughter for a ten year-old son. Asthmatic, but not whiny. And, since I’d never been thrilled with the doctor-nurse thing, I gave her a job in the hospital public relations department. The ten years I’d spent in corporate PR provided me with loads of horror stories I could put to good use. Finally, I turned her into an all-American California girl who just loves the hero’s Irish accent. Now he needed a medical specialty and, since I’d just finished an article on neonatal intensive care units for the Los Angeles Times, I put him to work saving tiny babies. The only snag with all these changes was my mum who was kind of disappointed to learn that she wasn’t going to be immortalized between the covers of a book. I promised her a starring role in the next one.

After a few months, the old critique group folded and I joined a new one. Every Thursday, for nearly two years, I’d bring in my ten pages to read aloud. Sometimes it was kind of embarrassing because the three guys in the group wrote macho guy stuff. They didn’t exactly snicker, when my heroine daydreamed about the hero, but I started anticipating their reaction whenever I wrote a particularly mushy scene. Before long, Martin, my hero, was throwing chairs through windows and talking in monosyllabic grunts. Just like the guys in their books.

Not surprisingly, by the middle of the book, I could no longer stand Martin, so I dumped him and started something new. An Irish book with a kinder, gentler hero. At this point, I began to realize a couple of things. One that I seemed to have this thing about Irish heroes and, two, that the instructor had been full of it when he said romance was easy to write. My husband stopped asking how soon I’d finish the book and, bless him, never once reminded me about the exotic vacation. In fact, The Book became a topic we carefully avoided. Still, I plugged on, finished the Irish book and signed with an agent I’d met at a conference.

An agent. Checks rolling in. Greek islands. And then she asked me how I saw my book. Did I think of it as a romance? A mystery? Suspense? What? This question stumped me as it had when other people asked it. “I guess it’s kind of a romance,” I’d always say and then my voice would trail off. Sure I’d heard all the advice about understanding the market and reading the kinds of books you want to write, but I figured mine would just magically find a home. Meanwhile, when I wasn’t writing, I continued to read books by obscure English authors whose writing I found wildly entertaining but unlike anything I wrote myself.

While the agent shopped the Irish book around, I finished the Martin book, sent it off and started outlining a third. Clearly on a roll now, I was on the verge of reminding my husband of his unwarranted skepticism when my agent called. The book had collected half a dozen or so rejections, she said, mostly because it “kind of fell between between two chairs.” I assumed she didn’t mean that literally. A few weeks later, she wrote to say she was releasing me from my contract.

At this point, I’d like to say I learned my lesson, studied the market and went on to make a sale. I’d like to say that. Instead I did some more surgery on the Martin book, made him stop throwing chairs through windows and behaving like an obnoxious jerk and sent out some queries. One afternoon, I got a call from an agent to say that he really liked the three chapters he’d read and wanted to see the rest of the book. When I signed with him a few weeks later, he asked that old bugaboo question about how I saw the book. My answer? “Well . . . it’s kind of a romance, I guess.”

I have the stack of rejection letters he passed on to me. They praise my writing, complement me on character and plot but essentially echo the comments my first agent received. Not enough romance, not exactly a mystery, doesn’t quite fit anywhere. This agent didn’t formally release me from the contract, but when I sent the next book he wrote back to say he couldn’t represent it.

He also gave me a piece of advice. If he recognizes himself here, I hope he won’t mind me quoting him. ‘You are writing somewhere between contemporary romance and good contemporary literary fiction,’ he said. ‘If you really want to get published (and not just write) you have to make some more focused choices . . .’

I did. My first was to choose, clearly and unequivocally, to write romance. No more waffling answers to the question of what exactly I’m writing. The second was to read the type of novels I wanted to write. I know, not exactly earth shattering stuff, huh? Who hasn’t heard it a dozen times before? Still I’m surprised at the number of writers I talk to -- even at RWA events -- who give the kind of vague answer I once did when asked what they’re writing. And while I’m not surprised when I hear non-writing friends make the faintly disdainful claim that they ‘never read romance,’ I am when I hear it from RWA members trying to get published. Perhaps I shouldn’t be though, since I did the very same thing.

Well, it’s been a long journey and I’ve learned a lot since the days of the young widow on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth. I’m sure my mum won’t see much of herself in the heroine when she picks the book off the shelf next May. Yep, I did the homework, studied the market, plowed through endless revisions and, finally, heard an editor say, “We’d like to buy your book.”

If only I’d listened sooner.