For the last couple of years, you might have noticed that the tagline for my blog has been, “In Progress: A New Author Navigates the World of Publishing.” I was never given a map, so my journey has taken a while and looked something like those maps from the comics I never found funny as a kid:

It’s even less funny when you’re the one wandering around. As you might have noticed, while I have still been plugging away at the food blog, I’ve been pretty silent over here. I have been working on a number of things, but one of the lessons I learned in the past year is getting published involves a lot of waiting.

Around about a year ago, I started sending out letters to agents to try to get my first novel published in the fantasy genre. After about 6-8 months of the slow back and forth of waiting to hear, writing more people, getting rejections or manuscript requests, waiting to hear back again, etc. I started to see a pattern. I was getting a lot of letters along the lines of, “We like what we read, but it just doesn’t fit with what I’m looking for.”

I knew already that I had a bit of a genre bending novel, and I had already had one surprise when I realized I had not written a young adult novel. So, I went back and did some more research again, and found out I had written a paranormal romance or perhaps urban fantasy, not straight fantasy. At that point, I had to reconsider my whole strategy. I’ve written here before that often self publishing is still not the way to go for most authors. The one exception to this rule is if you are writing anything in the romance genre.

Now finding that I had written a paranormal romance, instead of starting the process of finding an agent all over again with a romance agent, I decided to strike it out on my own with self publishing. It had taken me the better part of a year to figure out how to navigate the traditional publishing process. Self publishing is a different arena entirely. Thankfully, a very dear friend self publishes in the romance genre, and she has very patiently tutored me in the process.

All of this to say, I have not been idle while I haven’t been blogging. In fact, it is just the opposite. I have been trying to devote the time to getting an actual book out faster. As you will note, my tagline has changed. My navigating days are coming to a close, and the publishing is about to begin.

Stay tuned!