BookingIt

A publisher has had my full for three months now. Knowing I could get a rejection, revision or a call any day is so nerve-wracking! What would happen with my life if I got published? How would it change? It's a new year. Many of you said you'd like to start querying this year. Have you began yet? How is it going? How would getting published change your life, and do you think you're ready?

" some of us aren't the typical romance reader who has time to read one book after another while the husband is away at work, while we're waiting on the kids at soccer practice or while we're homeschooling our kids. " I read this comment on a blog the other day. It made me laugh a little but also caused me to think about how easy it is to generalize people. I tend to think romance writers have certain qualities in common, but what about romance readers? Do you think their commonalities are more internal than external? When you think of someone who reads romance, what do you see? Have you ever made an assumption about someone and then been proven completely wrong?

First, are you in the midst of preparing your query? Don't forget to polish up your proposal too. Agent Jill Corcoran posts about the importance of finding comparable books for your proposal Also, my crit partner Linda has started her very first blog. Check her out HERE . We all know how fragile a writer's ego is. Check out laugh-out-loud author Sandra Bricker as she dishes about The Secret Life of Writers and Their Egos . What do you think? Will there ever be a time where you'll shed your writerly insecurities? Have you ever overcome a deep insecurity? How?

*grossness alert* We all have to learn to deal with doo-doo eventually. Consider me a newbie mom, but it never occurred to me that my son should be wiping himself until about a month before kindergarten. And then the flashbulb went on and I scrambled to teach him. One problem. He didn't want to. He's fastidious and doesn't like to make mistakes, so the thought of taking care of this daily chore literally reduced him to screaming and crying on the toilet. Basically, he didn't trust himself. He was afraid. Scared to get his hands dirty. Afraid he'd miss something. This is probably weird, but it made me think of us as writers. There comes a point where we have to "grow up" and trust ourselves. We can't always rely on a crit group, agent, or editor to wipe up our mess. I think this should be a part of maturation for every writer, that we can look at our work and be confident in our ability to clean it up. Not saying we'll make it perfect or that we won...

Yes, I'm tooting my own horn. Very unhumble, right? LOL When I was a child, I often felt older, like I knew everything I needed to know. That wonderful self-assuredness carried me through high school. Then I got married and entered a new phase of my life as a wife. I still felt like a teen though. Last year I felt the first rumblings of some new thing. The suspicion that I was leaving the scene of young womanhood and entering into some new and vast territory. Today I am twenty-six. Still a wife and a mother. No longer a teenager or a young woman. Not yet a middle-aged woman. I have regrets. Looking back, I hope to not repeat the hurts of my youth, but have to wonder if mistakes are inevitable. Either way, I'm curious at to what I'll encounter in this new place of my life. Today I am a woman, and I'm not quite sure what that means, only that it is different. How do you define woman?