KMM: Sunday is Saint Patrick’s Day which is always a day of celebration for me. Fifteen years ago, on March 17th, 1998 at 2:23 in the afternoon, I was at work when I got the call: Maggie Crawford with Bantam Dell had finished reading Beyond the Highland Mist and wanted to sign me to a two-book contract.
Life distilled to a moment of perfect happiness. I walked around in a bubble of joy for weeks. After I got off the phone, I read and re-read the salient points of the deal that I’d scribbled (on a lunch-stained paper towel because I’d been so shaky and nervous that I’d not been able to find a single sheet of paper on my paper-covered desk) trying to convince myself that it had really happened.
I’d sold a manuscript to a major publishing house; the eight-hundred pound gorilla, no less! Little did they know, I was so hungry to be a writer, I would have paid them to publish me.
For the curious: I got a $5,000.00 advance for BTHM. We don’t get into this business for the money up front. If we’re very lucky, we make some on the other end.
When I first began writing I taped a quote to the top of my computer screen so I’d see it every time I wrote.
"When you chase a dream the Universe conspires to help you get it."
Fifteen years later I still have it there.
Chase hard. Balls to the wall.
In the word's of Neil Gaiman's eternal footman: Death: "You got what anyone gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime."
Have a blessed and happy Saint Patty’s Day.
Fitting, today we post the cover for my fifteenth book!
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