Happy news update and bouncing
Bouncy, amazed, chirpy, I was bopping around my house feeling as though I were buoyed up by several large balloons, one under each arm, making it feel as if my feet barely touched the floor. Let me tell you why.
I am blessed by being part of an exceptionally wonderful writing group. All of us are professional writers and have taught writing at the university level. As well, we also value one another’s friendship and really enjoy each other’s writing. So when I got a gentle nudge, “Why aren’t you sending that poetry book out?” from one of these pals, I sat up and paid attention.
I’d only discovered the book was finished several weeks before when I’d submitted some poems to Empty Bowl Press for an anthology. I knew the poems were hiding in that particular book somewhere. Not only did I find the poems, when I reread the book to find out how much work it would be to finish, I also found out sometime in the foggy past, my poetry book had already been completed. It was done; tidy, paginated, the Table of Contents in place, and Acknowledgements . Well, that was a nice surprise. And re-reading it, I thought yes, this book ended on just the note I wanted.
Maybe, as my friend had suggested, it really was time to send the book out into the world to seek its fortune like a hero in a fairytale.
The one thing I didn’t have in my query letter to McGill-Queen’s University Press, MQUP, was a selling paragraph, a description of what the book’s about that would make an editor want it. “Come over for tea,” another writing pal said. “We’ll set ChatGPT on it.” I was twitchy about this as our other partner-in-writing has a hypersensitivity to and dislike of the bombastic abstractions that Chat GPT specializes in. McGill-Queen’s University Press, is a very nice publisher. They had published a previous collection of mine, so I could hope.
After two cups of tea and my friend’s help, I’d taken a phrase from ChatGPT, and a few words, and had written a new paragraph in my own words. It was a worthwhile exercise that took me out of my own closed thinking, the way that using a thesaurus can suggest new possibilities. I recognize the mere mention of ChatGPT makes many writers, myself included, nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. However, in my life as a writer I have gone from manual typewriters to electric, to dedicated word processors, to computers, so if there are ways to use this as a tool, it’s probably best to poke at it and find out. As I write this, my face is screwed up as if I were considering poking a snake.
All right. Letter written, our ChatGPT-loathing friend approved the one paragraph: it was not bombastic and it sounded like me. With this go-ahead, I emailed my letter and the book to McGill-Queen’s and sat back to wait. My brother had been associated with the University of Calgary Press for some years and he’d told me earlier that six months would be quick.Likely it would be a year before I heard back from MQUP.
I wasn’t fretted. Jorrie 3, the third in my Young Adult fantasy series, was taking up pretty much all my time, turning into a much more complex novel than I’d anticipated. It truly is fun, though, when fictional life becomes so real. Author Richard Rudd said, “Creative minds don’t simply invent fiction; rather, they act as receivers, accessing alternate, very real worlds.” I laughed with delight when I first heard this, as it exactly expresses the way I feel.
I was well submerged in Jorrie 3 again when I checked my email three days later. There was something from MQUP: wait, the editor was saying he’d accepted my book!
So there was me, bouncy. Balloons lifting me. I cut flowers from my garden to celebrate. My little house was sparkly. I texted friends and family, many of whom were away. I had to make do with, “Guess what?” phone calls
The next day, my editor emailed with changes he’d made: could I look at them and get back to him in a month? The changes were extremely gentle, discussing commas and the deletion of the book’s subtitle. Well, I was so excited I got the ms. back to him in a day; from my end, it was easy, mainly line spacing errors from being formatted differently. Then we repeated the process again of reading and checking. This back-and-forthing was another process that usually takes months. But we were on fire: it was one week from submission date to edits marked FINAL.
So if you see me out and about, still floating along an inch off the ground, come and give me a hug. I’m celebrating a truly magical experience and am so pleased to share it with you! When I have a publication date, I’ll let you know—
Thank you, Jane!
Congratulations!!