A Lot to Learn

This is the first entry of my writing blog...Yes, I've written a book and am currently working on the sequel. Since I could read I've always loved, loved, loved it. To this day when I find a good book my nose attaches to it like neodymium-iron-boron magnets to a refrigerator...The world passes me by while my mind is filled with fairies and nymphs and goblins and characters I feel I know and care about...
But I had never dreamed of writing myself--even when I took the Creative Writing class in college--until October 2007 when I sat down to check my email and thought, "I'm going to write a book!". I intended it to be a children's book, but VIOLET refused to be told quite so simply and a couple months later I had the rough draft of a Young Adult fantasy novel.
A very, very rough draft...nonetheless I sent it to Cedar Fort publishers and they told me that I had a lot of talent and gave suggestions for improvement (stating I should resend the manuscript when the improvements were made). In the authorship world that is huge! So as I moved toward making improvements I got pregnant with our second child...and I got very ill (I am blessed with completely miserable pregnancies). :) Needless to say it took me a year and a half to resend the manuscript and by then (the economy was on the downturn and) they replied saying it was imaginative, but they couldn't successfully market my type of book.
So here I am, months later, still trying to make improvements on the manuscript and learn about the world of publishing. There's a LOT to learn! I spent three hours at the library last night writing down the names of agencies and publishers that work with my genre and there are still so many more to discover!
Once my manuscript is to my liking--and my query letter is sparkling with perfection--I will send out queries like the world is on the brink of termination!
I can't believe how much I just LOVE to write! I will do it forever and look forward to dabbling in all types of genre of fiction and non-fiction. Hooray for the written word!! And so here I will sit...clicking away...