Why can't vampires and werewolves just get along?

We return now to our regularly scheduled 'how I got published' posts. The last few posts saw our intrepid heroine (aka me) get three requests from agents for her full and a request from a Canadian publisher to rewrite and resubmit. We take up the story from there ...

Of the three agents who requested my full, the project wasn’t right for them. But I am still stalking two of them, and will keep up the contact as my career progresses and I have a few more books published.

That brings us to the summer of 2008. I took leave without pay and my holidays to spend two months writing. On the friday of the Calgary Stampede (for my friends outside of Canada a definition is needed. The Stampede is either a celebration of western cowboy/rodeo culture or an opportunity to drink too much and eat way too many pancakes and sausages - or both), I went to a book reading called Chocolate and Chat it was put on by two writers of young adult books k.c. dyer and James McCann. k.c. is the organizer of the Surrey International Writers' Conference (SiWC) and the author of a number of y/a books, including a time travel series. James writes urban fantasy vampire/werewolf books (which leads to the title of this blog post - why can't vampires and werewolves just get along? If anyone knows, please let me know.) 

I don't know if was because of Stampede or because it was smoking hot out and other writers didn't want to come out of their caves, but I was the only one who showed up. So I had them to myself and peppered them with questions about the path of my manuscript. We agreed that I was close and probably in the top ten percent of submissions. I asked: "how do I get from 90% to 100%." They both agreed that the only difference was persistence. They told me about two newer publishers in Vancouver. I sent off two more queries.... 

The next post - cracking the Da Vinci code of editorial letters!