I think of my pre-call days as The Years of Mail Box Terror. I live in a rural area and during the time in which I submitted and resubmitted the manuscript that became my first sale, my husband and I developed a routine. We would drive to the mail box and he would open it, pull out the mail and quickly shuffle through it as I practiced modified Lamaze breathing until he announced the all clear. No rejection today.

I submitted a partial manuscript to Harlequin Superromance in January of 2004 and on St. Patrick’s Day of that year, I received a request for a full. I was dancing on air—right up until I received my rejection in June. But…the editor mentioned in the letter that if I cared to rewrite and resubmit, addressing several issues she was kind enough to point out, that she would read it again. It wasn’t a revision letter, but it was the next best thing. A soft rejection. I rewrote and resubmitted and the wait began. Again. Five months later I got a call from the editor—which she immediately prefaced with, “This isn’t the call you’re waiting for.” It wasn’t? I had a Harlequin editor on the line, which was one of my dreams, but no, it wasn’t the call I’d been waiting for. Again, though, it was the next best thing. This editor had taken the time to call me and discuss the problems with my story. This time I got a real revision letter and a huge case of nerves. My husband was spreading the news, so, if I failed, it would be a well-publicized, glorious failure, not a simple crawling off to lick the wounds in private kind of failure.

I rewrote and just about the time I was ready to resubmit, “my” editor changed lines. What now? I sent it to her anyway, hoping for the best. She had told me that this time it wouldn’t take five months, so five and a half months later I decided that the rejection must have been lost in the mail months ago and I was waiting for something that was never going to arrive. I sucked it up and called Harlequin and the lovely assistant editor told me that the book was still under consideration. Oh happy day…and more mail box terror.

Two days later, on January 6, 2006, while I was watching my junior high science class work on their assignments, I got The Call on my cell phone at my desk, and my new editor told me she wanted to buy my book, A Difficult Woman. I refrained from doing back handsprings, since I did have an audience, but mentally I was performing amazing tumbling routines. I work in the same building as my husband, so I was able to give him the news almost immediately and then I settled in for a day of bliss—an almost unheard of phenomenon in a junior high setting. And that night when we went home, my husband sorted through the mail slowly for the first time in many years.

This post was submitted by Jeannie Watt.

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