The winter of my rewriting ...

So it was an amazing weekend at the Surrey International Writers' Conference. I knew agents only took on very little of what they requested, but it was encouraging to get that much attention for my work.

That winter, close to a year after I sent the original submissions of Dead Frog on the Porch, the waiting continued. At the end of December, I got an email from the Senior Editor at Publisher ‘A’ saying they “... wished they could give me an unqualified ‘yes’” but that they had some problems with the plot that they suggested could be addressed in a rewrite. On New Year’s Eve, I received a letter from the Vice President of a top New York literary agency who said that despite the manuscript’s many charms she was going to pass and expected that I would be “ … snatched up by another agent soon.” Spent some time howling at the moon “snatch me up!” then moved on. 

I did a rewrite for Publisher ‘A’ and sent it to them at the end of January 2008. I got a quick-by-publishing-standards response (March) from the Senior Editor who said she would have put me under contract but that it was a small press and they all had to agree. She had lost the vote. While I was disappointed, it confirmed that I had a publishable manuscript on my hands and my search for the right publisher continued.