As we’ve discussed, only two percent of authors seeking agent representation will ever be signed. The Blue Fairy is one elusive bitch.

I’m delighted to tell you that I am officially a Two Percenter.

Selfie was accepted for representation by The Transatlantic Agency. It’s a Canadian agency with agents and representation channels in the U.S.  Once again, Crabby Ol’ Shawn McWhinerson adds “Agented Author” to his business card. Yay me.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while. It took an excruciatingly long time for some hoops to be jumped through and for me to be certain that I was, indeed, greenlighted. As a matter of fact, ironically, I got the first email setting up “The Call” a few hours after my post on not letting other people bully you out of your art.

35 hours later, I was on the phone with a woman who was telling me that she loved my novel because it broke an appropriate amount of rules with an appropriate modicum of skill.

So, thereyago. Mr. Toldyaso.  Score one for the “But it’s MY art, man!” dicks. Enough said on that topic.

We’ve also discussed that only one-in-four projects under representation actually end up bought and printed by a publishing company. The odds are still against me and I have a long way to go to see Selfie in print.

On a quick downbeat note, if you are a parent (especially of tween girls) and you’ve never seen the video Amanda Todd posted to YouTube before she killed herself, you should probably force yourself to sit through it. My inability to get that video out of my brain inspired me to write Selfie as a moral tale for the digital age.

I owe some folks gratitude and shout-outs for all the help and support I got with Selfie.

This is a little weird, but it’s true. I went to elementary school with Lorie Smith Wilson. Thanks to the Westermarck effect, I was somehow oblivious to the fact that Lorie grew up to be an absolute knockout, even though we walked through the same high school halls every day. Flash forward to 2005 when a raven haired beauty approached me at a high school reunion. It took me a moment to get my mental ducks in a row and remember A.) “Oh wow. That’s Lorie Smith,” and B.) just how far back Lorie and I go. Perhaps first grade. Perhaps kindergarten. She remembered me writing “books” in second grade. She asked if I was still writing.

“Ehn,” I shrugged. “I wrote a novel in college, but it never went anywhere.”

“So why didn’t you write another?” she asked.

Again I shrugged, embarrassed.

“Huhn,” she said, narrowing her dark eyes. “See, I always thought that if anybody from our class would ever make it big, it would have been you. You were always kind of different.”

It was a very kind thing for her to say. Our conversation lasted fewer than three mintues, but it echoed in my head for a long time afterward. What was I doing with my life? Why wasn’t I still chasing my dream? Why hadn’t I written another novel?

A month later I started work on my second novel. And now, coming up on a decade later, I’m an agented author (again) for novel number eight. It all began with Lorie taking a moment to bend my ear and share a kind word, a kind word that shamed me into getting back up in the saddle. Thanks, Lorie.

Next comes a thank you to Wendy Leaumont. In the first few days of my writing Selfie, Wendy posted an amazing selfie on Facebook. She wasn’t even my friend at that point. Just a friend of a friend. Wendy is an adult woman with the good genetics to look like a teenager. I saw her selfie and said, “That! That’s my protagonist girl! That’s the cover! That! That!”  It sounds silly, but sometimes it’s that kind of strong visualization that leads to pages of words vibrating out of my fingertips.

I knew that my homemade cover for Selfie featuring Wendy would sell a lot of books if I self-published. I held off on buying the rights to the photo, hoping it would get picked up. That hope is still alive. Thank you, Wendy.

Thank you to beta reader Angela Smith. Not only were you a champion typo killer, but you were very encouraging and sweet and reminded me that I could write characters vivid enough to live in the imagination of others.

Thanks go out to Chris Webb. I’m not being ironic or a smartass when I say that Chris was the first person to tell me his strongly-felt issues with the novel. He had some good points, and while I did not change all the things Chris didn’t like, it was his pointed-yet-tactful criticism that helped me frame the “bigger picture” of the story I was trying to tell and dramatically rewrite my query into something much better than it was. Without Chris, I wouldn’t have the query. Without that query, I would not have representation. Thank you, Harpo.

Thank you to beta readers Sheri Beckham Stoffel and Lisa Noonan Klein for your kind words and your time.

I was at a low point, ready to give up, (physically exhausted and slumped over the table of a pizza joint in Bumfuck, Nowhere) when I got a ridiculously nice feedback email from Patti Layne Goldberg. I didn’t even know that she had downloaded Selfie during the window I had it open to beta read, but she did. She caught some typos that had gone undetected, and she blew some much-needed sunshine up my skirt when I was defeated. I can honestly say that I would not have stuck-to-it long enough to enjoy this tiny respite of victory if not for Patti’s perfectly timed email out of the blue.

Long after the manuscript had been edited, finalized, and already out to agents requesting fulls, friend Eric asked if he could beta read. “Sure,” I thought. “Why not? Too late to be making changes at this point. But… What could it hurt?”

Eric sent me back three questions about the novel that pointed out three mistakes in the narrative. Logic mistakes. Things someone would only notice if they were reading really carefully. Two small ones and one big doozy. I addressed Eric’s questions with the addition of five sentences to Selfie. Those might be the five most important sentences in the book. Eric, dude, you fucking ROCK. Thank you.

And, of course, there is My Beautiful Wife. Not only is she an extraordinary beta reader, but she’s the boot in my ass when I’m feeling sorry for myself and depressed. After the big emotional crash of being an agent’s “Sorry, wrong number,” MBW waded into a puddle of Scotch, hooked her tiny hands under my armpits, and dragged me back to the adults’ table. Honey, without you I am nothing. I am navel lint. You are the very song of my upright heart and I adore you beyond words, beyond measure.

Again, I’m still a long damn way from being published, but this was a huge step. Huge.

DONALD TRUMP LIFTS HIS HANDS: “Yuge!”

And I would not be here if not for the help I got from a team of great people; people who all had better things to do and helped me for no reason other than altruism. Thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you all.

More to come. Stay tuned.