The Summer of ALL THE THINGS

In the spring of 2007, my first-ever agent asked me for revisions on my first-ever novel, Sins of the Angels. Of course, I said "of course!" And then she sent me six single-spaced pages of notes for what amounted to a full rewrite...by September.

If it had only been the rewrite, it would have probably been pretty easy. But around that same time, the seemingly innocuous garage-sale find of a bathroom cabinet led me to believe that our entire bathroom needed renovation (because avocado green)...and my husband agreed (he'd been pushing for a reno for years). Logically, of course, the next words out of my mouth were "Well. If we're going to retile the bathroom, then we might as well get rid of the carpet in the living room and hallway and do those floors, too. And if we're going to do that, then..." and suddenly our furniture was stored in the master bedroom, my husband and I were sleeping on an air mattress in the basement, and we were in the middle of a full-fledged renovation of the entire main floor.

And then, because things might have gotten boring otherwise, our youngest daughter was diagnosed with Asperger's, and in between removing baseboards, trips to the hardware store, and trying to figure out what the heck my agent meant by "world-building," I began reading everything I could get my hands on about the syndrome. One of the first things I learned? People with Asperger's don't react well to change.

You know, like having their entire house ripped apart. Oops.

But we were too far into the reno to back out now, and so we forged ahead. I wrote at the coffee shop from seven until eleven every morning (seven days a week), helped my husband lay down hardwood floor in the afternoons, and read up on Asperger's until I fell asleep at night.

Then, apparently not wanting to be left out of the action, one of my other daughters had a housing crisis and needed to move home. "Oh, goodie," I said as the movers dropped the POD in our driveway. "More change."

My knees hurt from flooring, I was exhausted and stressed and (so I've been told) cranky. But, clinging to my writing dream with both hands, I stubbornly continued to write. I learned how to build a world, I cut entire scenes and rewrote whole chapters, and I ditched several secondary characters and strengthened the remaining ones. I wrote, I floored/researched/primed/painted, and I wrote some more.

In August, our older daughter moved out again. I turned the story in to my agent in September as promised; and just before Christmas (months later than expected), we finally completed the renovations. We'd survived, we were still married, and I had discovered depths of sheer, dogged persistence I hadn't known I possessed.

I sold Sins of the Angels in January and started writing book two in the series -- and then I decided we needed a new puppy. 

But that's a whole other story...