If you read my blog regularly, then you know that after precisely fifty-four bazillion rewrites, my second middle grade novel, Lula Bell on Geekdom, Freakdom & the Challenges of Bad Hair, FINALLY found a publishing home – yippeeee!
What you probably don’t know is that more than one publishing house offered Lula Bell…a home – and I am so grateful to each and every one of them. That said, multiple offers do slow the process down, as each offer must be carefully considered – there’s a lot more than money to consider – trying to find the right long-term editor is like trying to find the right guy! Luckily, my wonderful literary agent, Emily van Beek, knew exactly how to handle things, and she did – beautifully.
So there wasn’t much for me to do except wait. I am a terrible, terrible waiter. I worry. I doubt. I begin to think things like, All of these editors are going to come to their senses and realize that I would do this work for free, that I have been doing this work for free, just for fun, and then they’re all going to take their offers and go home – and my literary agent, not to mention my family, is going to be sooo disappointed! That’s what I really thought. But there just wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Even so, I had to do something.
So, I scrubbed our kitchen from top to bottom,
(Look, Mom! No crumbs!)
reorganized our gift-wrapping stuff,
(Yes, that is used tissue paper. I am both neat AND cheap!)