[Forward]

In the winter of 2002, I realized I just wasn't happy with my life. I was working at a trucking company managing anywhere from 60-70 drivers daily. I worked sixty-plus hour workweeks. And though the people I worked with were nice, I felt a driving need to create, to write the stories I couldn't find in any of the bookstores I plagued. And heck, I'd been writing since I could read, stories on index cards and then notebooks. So why not put pen to paper for real?

I'd always talked about being a writer, and I'm not sure what muse slapped me upside the head, but I realized to be a writer you have to WRITE. At work, I used all my lunch breaks writing. I wrote at night. During the mornings when I had a spare moment. My husband took notice and encouraged me, and then he did something more. He knew how unhappy I was and told me to go for my dream. We weren't rich but were comfortable, and cutting our income in half was tough. But we did it. And I'll never be able to thank him enough for that.

That entire first year I wrote religiously. I never slept in, never took time off. It was my full-time job and I loved it. I was impatient to be published. How could I earn my first million if I wasn't published after my first draft was turned in? (Dreadfully naive, but man, have I learned since.)

Finishing that first book was tough but I did it. Entering contests with that manuscript helped tremendously, especially with head-hopping POVs and jarring sentences. I majored in English, so writing itself wasn't a trial. I enjoyed it. But the process of laying out a story from beginning to end takes practice.

So after that first manuscript, I wrote more. I submitted to Silhouette Intimate Moments, my publishing goal at the time, and received personal, helpful rejection letters. I continued to write and attended local RWA meetings every month. I wrote nine manuscripts that first year. (Nine that have yet to see the light of day. Learning tools, as I like to think of them.)

No matter how many times I was told "no" I plunged forward. And then at one chapter meeting I learned about electronic publishing. I'd never heard of it. The first ebook I bought was on a floppy disk because I had no idea you could download stories directly to your computer. This from a person who used to work in the IT field.

In any case, the epublisher I targeted published stories varying from sweet to very sensual. I'd never written erotic romance, but my stories bordered on pushing that envelope to swing the bedroom door wide open.

Once I started writing for me, not worrying about my audience or, God forbid, my mother reading my work, the vampire story I wrote flowed. I sold it to New Concepts Publishing in 2003, saw it published in 2004 and continued to write.

The rejections I received I store in a binder. Rejections from publishers, agents and editors. Some are form letters, but most of them offer some helpful criticism I've used to polish my writing in recent years. I now have over twenty books published in electronic format and in print, and I landed an agent.

I'm currently in the middle of edits for a work I'm targeting at New York. The edits are even more massive, the criticism sharper, the stakes higher, but I wouldn't trade any of it. Every rejection and constructive criticism has put me where I am today... on the path toward that goal of reaching my dream.

Marie
www.marieharte.com