Guest Post: Joy Preble

In preparation for my review posting of Dreaming Anastasia tomorrow I’d like to tike the opportunity to hand the reigns of Galleysmith over to author Joy Preble. Welcome Joy!

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I’m what one would call a late bloomer. Publicist Paul and I dance our way around this now and then, as famously indicated by my blog post about Twitter wherein I mentioned that I was fairly certain that his reference to his parents’ Alaskan cruise was a pointed dig at my inability to figure out where the Tweetdeck was located. I’m not old, exactly, but my son has graduated college now and so most people can do the math and figure out that unless I’m writing a novel about how I became a mother at the age of twelve, that I’m old enough to know better about a lot of things. Full disclosure – I rarely know better. But I like to pretend.

And as this post is supposed to be about my journey to publication, at least more or less, let me say that this was a prime example of me not knowing crap about what I was really supposed to be doing with my life. Or rather, I knew, but I ignored it. Which honestly, is a lot easier to do than you think. I’d write a little, start a book, maybe even get something published in a magazine or a newspaper and then I’d basically get some sort of career attention deficit moment and just wander off to do something else. This resulted in many interesting adventures, some strange part time jobs (the worst being when I was hired to be a “marketing assistant” for a woman who was starting her own line of scarves and ended up ironing and folding scarves with eight elderly Polish women, none of whom spoke a word of English) and a long gig of teaching, in addition to the above mentioned child-rearing thing. But it did not result in a book on a shelf.

But the muse, she is a funny and persistent girl. And the universe, I’ve discovered, has a way of making you pay attention. So the truth is that about five years ago, a little after I’d finally gotten off my ass to some extent and joined SCBWI and started going at least sporadically to conferences and a critique group, I suddenly found myself having the worst possible year ever at the school where I was teaching. By worst, let me say that what I really mean is utter despair. The kind of year that makes you want to just say f*** it and run off and join an ashram somewhere or at the very least go home every day and drown your academic colleague hell woes in a bottle of Jameson’s or that being unaffordable on your teacher salary, a cheap bottle of Merlot.

There’s a lot of mental wallowing that comes with that type of year. And said wallowing was also occurring while I was looking down the jaws of above mentioned son’s imminent high school graduation. It was, as they say – whoever they are – time for a change.

Now I’d like to say here that I stuck my butt in a chair, yanked out my laptop and finally got to work. But at that point, I didn’t even have a laptop. What I actually did was start looking for a different teaching job. Even got one. Went into my principal’s office and resigned. Went home and told husband and son. Went out to dinner to celebrate my grand ability to take charge of my life. And in the middle of my tandoori chicken, I started to panic. Cold sweat kind of panic. My son figured it was the curry.  Except it wasn’t, and the next day, I asked for my old job back, quit the new one and pulled out the two pages of a story that had come to me one rainy day when it was pouring too hard to leave the building.

It had finally occurred to me that I wanted to write. I needed to write. It wasn’t going to make any of those other things better. It was just one of those rare moments where I was absolutely certain that this was what I was supposed to be doing. (I’ve had those moments before, btw. Dating the guy on the fencing scholarship. That third shot of tequila at a party. A red and white striped t-shirt that I thought looked cute in the dressing room but actually made me look like Where’s Waldo)

So I wrote. And I wrote. And some weeks later, all I managed was two pages. We have a rule in our critique group that you must come with new work every time we meet. Some weeks, that was the only reason I wrote. And by the fall of 2005, I had the first draft of the novel that would eventually become Dreaming Anastasia.

My life was still chaotic, but I’d done this thing I’d set out to do. It felt different. Good different, not crap! the chicken tandoori is about to blow its way out of my stomach different, although honestly no less scary. I think I realize now that changing your life is always scary. But that’s a good thing.

So there was this story. And because it was my first novel, I thought I’d do something simple, like having three narrative voices and re-writing it from third person to first person to make it work better and adding an element of Russian folklore to ground the fantasy elements and creating a novel that was part contemporary fantasy, part alternate history and part romance. Because hey, how hard could all that be?

Sometimes, I think, it’s easier when you don’t really know the answer to certain questions like that.

I wrote draft after draft. I queried agents. I kept getting up and teaching Julius Caesar to tenth graders. I even ate Indian food again, although that turned out a little dicey which is another issue entirely.

There’s a story I used to read my son when he was a little boy called “Leo the Late Bloomer.” It’s about this tiger who just can’t do anything right. But “One day, in his own good time,” Leo blooms.

And let’s just say that so did I.

In early 2006, I queried four more agents. Among them was Laura Rennert of Andrea Brown Literary, who passed my manuscript, then titled Spark, on to new agent Michelle Andelman. Dreaming Anastasia is dedicated to two people. One of them is my mom, who died too early to appreciate all this with me. The other is Michelle, who took a chance on a goofy, sarcastic girl from the slush pile named Joy and stuck her in revision boot camp for a long number of months until neither of us could look at the manuscript another second. Eventually, Lyron Bennett at Sourcebooks fell in love with it and acquired it in 2007. And then the real work began.

Between then and now, I survived Hurricane Ike when it hit Houston last fall. Michelle went on to a different area of the publishing world. I’m now repped by the best cowgirl agent a girl could want – Jen Rofe, also of ABLA, who puts up with me and nurtures me and tells me things will work out. Lyron left Sourcebooks (these are those moments where you do start asking, “Is it me? Did I forget to put on underwear or something?”) and my new editor is the stunningly brilliant Dan Ehrenhaft who will be the one with me when DA releases as Sourcebooks first YA on September 1^st. The Sourcebooks people directed the creation of the most amazing cover and somehow people in the blogosphere have started to catch on. Waiting on Wednesday picks, growing buzz of all sorts. It’s honestly rather crazy.

So the lesson here? The one beyond how you shouldn’t be stubborn and you should tweet if Publicist Paul tells you to? Well, I think it’s follow your dreams. You are never too young or too old or too in the middle to find your passion. But if it involves tandoori chicken, leave me out of it. I’m just saying…

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Thank you Joy for taking the time to reach out to Galleysmith readers, I’ve enjoyed hosting you.  To communicate with Joy directly give her a shout out at @JoyPreble , check out her website or visit her blog Joy’s Novel Idea she’d love to hear from you.