While I was querying Seeds I did what all the writing books and blogs and authors advised and started another project, one titled Out To Get You. It was in no way, shape or form similar to Seeds but I was having a ton of fun writing it. I mention it only because it puts in an appearance a little later in the story and I didn't want it to seem like it comes out of nowhere then. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention my other WIP I was cooking up at the time, my second child, a little boy. In June of 2010, exactly two weeks before my due date, I received a call with a New York area code. Even though there was no name associated with the number, I knew it was a call from Jennifer Weltz and I was right. Memories are fuzzy all these years later, but it seems like after a brief introduction and telling me she enjoyed Seeds she dove right in with everything she thought was wrong with the book. Me, having no previous experience with professional publishing, thought this was just how it worked and that every aspiring author who had their manuscript read in its entirety by a literary agent received a personal call from said agent to pick said manuscript apart. I had no idea it was unusual or a good indication of the level of the agent's interest. Mostly I just felt sweaty and kind of sick. It wasn't until near the end of the conversation when Ms. Weltz told me she'd be willing to consider representing me if I would revise Seeds keeping her critique in mind that I realized this call was, in fact, a positive thing. I jumped at the chance and then remembered I was due to give birth in two weeks and there was no way I'd be able to do such a deep revision in that amount of time. Ms. Weltz very graciously told me I could take all the time I needed and she looked forward to receiving the manuscript whenever it was ready.
Baby #2 arrived five days late, healthy but not exactly happy (that's him and a very tired me of roughly thirteen and a half years ago). He had colic which meant he screamed every day from approximately six p.m. until one thirty a.m..
The next six months of my life were a haze of misery. We also moved two states away so, obviously, not a lot of editing got done. By January of 2011 things had finally settled down and I was able to tackle the edits. I found a writing group in my new town (the only, and I mean the only, positive thing about moving) and enlisted their help to get me through the edits. I've since lost track of them but should they happen on this post, thank you Nico, Christopher, Ben, Lisa and Abi! Your input was invaluable! I completed the edits in May 2011 and, bouyed by my critique group's confidence in me, sent off the new and improved manuscript to Ms. Weltz. Then I got back to work on Out To Get You (oh, and also we moved again, back to the town we'd previosly moved from, no less. My husband's former employer decided they couldn't get along without him).
Fast forward to October of 2011. After five months of waiting, I nudged Ms. Weltz and received a form rejection only a couple days later. I was gutted. I'd put so much time, effort and energy into that revision and I knew the book was better, stronger. Evidently Ms. Weltz didn't agree, or the revisions didn't align with her vision. Whatever the reason, I was back at square one. I queried a few more agents and some small presses, but, while I still believed in my book, I was beat down by the rejections and had very little hope of a positive outcome. I didn't stop writing though. With the help of a couple people from my previous writer's group who had agreed to do online exchanges of our work, I edited Out To Get You and started working on a fourth manuscript, a YA dystopian this time (I was a big fan of Veronica Roth's Divergent series). As the rejections on Seeds trickled in, my fire to get published dwindled to a spark. It was easy to let the day to day stuff (another move, a third baby, helping my older kids with school stuff, volunteering for various things, all the myriad tasks involved in taking care of a house and a family and a marriage) take over. I briefly rallied in 2015 when my two older kids were in school and my third still napping and queried Out To Get You. After a resounding rounds of rejections, I gave up altogether, or so I thought. That lasted through the birth of a fourth child who was medically fragile for the first year of her life, another move and a worldwide pandemic, but I wasn't done yet.
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