Today on the Snarkology blog, Barbara Meyers says: “I don’t suppose many authors begin their writing careers by throwing another author’s book across the room and declaring, ‘I can write better than that,’ but that’s how I started.* It was a long time ago but I was that disgusted with a poorly written romance novel when I arrived at ‘the end’.”
Barbara created characters and stories for her own enjoyment, focused less on plot, piled up ‘a lot of unpublished manuscripts’, and kept writing even when her intermittent queries went nowhere. Finally, she asked herself: “If no one was reading my work, what was the point of writing all these stories?”
She dusted off one manuscript that seemed to have potential, and gave herself the goal of querying a hundred editors and agents before she quit writing. About thirty queries along, an editor from Samhain offered a contract. A Month From Miami was published nearly ten years after Barbara had written the first rough draft.
She’s another author who means it when she says: “If you are just starting out as a writer, I suggest you put a date on everything you write and never get rid of anything!”
* Author note: That’s how I began, too, though in another genre.