Starting all over again

I know, I've been incommunicado a long time. I could give all kinds of reasons, classes, Christmas season, illness, all of the above. Still it boils down to not making myself get on this thing and write. I've vowed to do better this year.

Especially since big things really have happened to me and my writing.

In 2009 I entered two of my works, Pull My String (PMS - no, I did not do the acronym on purpose), a contemporary YA novel, and Damaged Goods (DG), a mainstream adult novel, into a number of writing contests. All with great trepidation in my heart. Frankly, I expected tons of problems. Instead, both did well. By November, DG had a fifth place and a third place, and got a request for a full from one agent. That later resulted in a nice rejection letter. PMS took a third in one contest, with good response from the judging editor, unfortunately they weren't publishing YA at the time, so they made no request for more. Sigh! It finalled in another contest, The Golden Rose, but the results were not yet in, so I didn't have final placement.

With that encouragement I entered both into the Finally A Bride contest, a contest for manuscripts that finalled, but did not win, then the RWA Golden Heart romance contest and the Pikes Peak writers contest. (I decided I'd go contest crazy for one year, anyway.) I also sent our queries for both manuscripts, and apparently I can write a query that gets responses, because I got eight requests for either partials or fulls.

Then came December. And did I get a Christmas surprise.

Since that's a story in itself, I'll tell you more tomorrow.