The Charge Blogtour – The Long Road

I was sort of right. The novel I wrote in 2009 would become The Charge, but the original concept was different enough I count them as two separate novels.

I got so, so, so close with Novel 2009. It won or got honorable mention in more than one agent judged contest, and I got a handful of partial and full requests. For me, being close, but not quite publication ready was harder than writing a crappy book with no chance.

I had to accept the difficult fact that writing a good book was not enough to get published. I knew Novel 2009 had problems, but I also knew it had great things about it. Shelving a book you know is bad hurts like hell, but shelving a book you know is good is just horrible. It feels like such a waste and it’s hard to know if you’re doing the right thing.

But there is also a point where you’ve gone too far to turn back. I had put in so many hours, so much blood, sweat, and tears (okay, probably not any blood), I just had to keep trying.

Fortunately, my brilliant critique partners had given me all the insights I needed along the way to know where to go next, I just had to puzzle it all together and separate it from all the conflicting feedback noise.

I didn’t want to shelve The Charge, but I was discouraged and decided to at least move on to something else for a while. The publishing industry moves slowly and I’m not very patient. So, I had moved on before The Charge had really gotten a chance. I hadn’t thought about The Charge in a while, then I learned that it had made it through the first round of the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Competition. Then, a month later, The Charge became a quarterfinalist. I didn’t move to the semi-finalist round, but I did win a very positive Publishers Weekly review.

My success in the ABNA contest made me rethink everything. The expert judges and the Publishers Weekly reviewer thought it was great! The agents who read my query may not have fallen in love, or thought they would have trouble fitting it into the correct marketing box, but that didn’t mean the book wasn’t worth publishing. So, with my renewed confidence, I tried something new, I queried small publishers directly.

It didn’t take long at all for me to get some full requests, and in about a nanosecond in publishing time, Curiosity Quills Press made me an offer. And on March 2, 2013, my lifelong dream of publishing a novel finally came through.