When Opportunity Knocks: The Anatomy of a Viral Post, Part I

This is a repost, because...well...it's been one year. One year since I spotted a post somewhere on the interwebs about a study on allowing kids to fail. One year since a writer friend first read my article on that study and sent me an Atlantic editor's email address because, she said, my article might fit there. One year. 

One year. 

First posted in February, 2013. 

What a difference one week makes.

I wrote an article one week ago Saturday about the value of failure. I submitted it to various media outlets, it was rejected by most, but a lovely writer named Helaine Olen told me that the piece sounded like a great possibility for The Atlantic. Yeah, I laughed, I'll send it, but the Atlantic is on my bucket list, a periodical I had not really considered because it's, well, the Atlantic.

I sent the article to the Atlantic editor Helaine recommended around 10:00 AM in between a Latin class and an English class (we do, after all, have three whole minutes to ourselves between classes), and at 2:00 PM, I found out my article had been accepted.

I ran around the campus, a stupid smile on my face, and then settled down to the reality of editing.

The Atlantic editor was insanely good. Her edits were perfect. She tightened the piece and every change only rendered it more pointed and effective. I have been incredibly lucky with editors. K.J. Dell'Antonia and Robert Pondiscio are two of the best I've ever worked with, and I figured the gods had simply smiled on me. But three great editors? Whatever they get paid, it's not enough.

The article, "Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail," went live first thing Tuesday morning, and by Tuesday afternoon, it was obvious that something was going on. It quickly went from the top story on the National page to the top story overall, to the headline story and the number one most successful article on the site. And it stayed there, more or less, for almost a week.

On Wednesday afternoon, Fox News called. They asked me to do a segment on Fox and Friends from their Manchester studio. I was able to speed down there, get made up in about sixteen pounds of makeup, do the segment, and speed back in time to teach Robert Frost at 11.

Here's the clip for that video; there's no way for me to embed it.

As soon as the segment was over, however, they emailed back to ask me to be on the show again on the weekend broadcast. As I had meetings scheduled for Monday in NYC, I decided to head down for the weekend.

I arrived on the Crossroads Academy campus during our "Discover the Difference" day, and despite my sixteen pounds of makeup, prospective parents managed not to laugh and shook my hand while I talked up our English, Latin, and writing program. And then I washed my face for about an hour.

The weekend in NYC was a whirlwind, and Fox and Friends Weekend was a hoot. Besides, my lovely and handsome husband accompanied me to NYC and my parents took the kids, so we managed to have a wonderful (if busy) early Valentine's Day weekend in the city. He even sat in the Fox green room and held his liberal tongue.

Here's the link to that appearance, again, with sixteen pounds of makeup that looks good on air, but trust me, in person, it's just silly.

As of today, "Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail" has been shared 82,000 times on Facebook. I mean, really. It blows my mind, and I've hardly had the opportunity to revel in the fact that I was published in The Atlantic.

I really should not be allowed to hope for more.

But today, with three signatures on an agency agreement in triplicate, I celebrated a huge milestone. I signed with the agent I've been submitting to, stalking, complimenting, adoring, and respecting for six years. Six years.

What I've learned from this week? Patience is a virtue.

And when opportunity knocks, ride that puppy for all it's worth.

Here's part two of this story. 

P.S. My second article at The Atlantic just went live. "Introverted Kids Need to Learn to Speak Up at School." I have a feeling my vacation from negative comments has just ended.

P.P.S. I had the thrill of having two articles on The Atlantic's top ten articles, as this new piece has been shared over 4,000 times now...wheeee!

P.P.P.S. Here's the audio of my appearance yesterday on WBUR Boston.

The Measure of My Days

A teacher’s year is quantified by the same measures as a layman’s year; it divides up by the same three hundred and sixty five - give or take a leap - then the smaller twenty-four, and more minute sixty, but these measures are where the similarity ends.

Our year waxes where yours wanes, when you’re in full harvest of your year, we’re just beginning to plant for ours. When you burst forth from your winter lull in vibrant, tender shoots of spring, we’re falling back to earth as exhausted, empty hulls.

It’s been fourteen years since I walked into the first classroom I’d call my own, a hot, stale room in Durham, North Carolina. Since that day, my September has become a sacred month, steeped in the woody scent of newly sharpened pencils, the ink and paper tang of textbooks first cracked open, the reassuring disinfectant cleanse of bleach and Goo-Gone. Each year, I make that room my own once again. I nest and organize and stack and wait impatiently for those first students to arrive. When they do, it’s my first day all over again, and I’m as excited and nervous and overwhelmed as I was that day in Durham. But as much as I adore those first moments with my students, what I really look forward to, the reason I teach, are the day in, day out, small moments that anchor our relationship.

This year, however, I am untethered, adrift between calendars, unsure of how to account for my time.

When I agreed to the dark, hulking deadline that looms on my professional writing horizon, I had to admit that there would simply not be enough of me to distribute among all my words and all my students.

So, for the first time in many years, September does not mark my return to the classroom, and fall is simply fall. This September, though equal in loveliness to all my other Septembers, no longer marks the beginning of my year.

But, like a phantom limb, the old rhythms persist. I’ve been thinking about what Shakespeare I would have taught this year, how I’d have approached my favorite extended metaphor in Great Expectations, and I speculate about the topics my rising eighth graders might choose for their graduation essays. I’ll be there, in the audience, but that’s hardly the same thing.

The measure of my days has shifted from seven class periods to three thousand words, and while the smell of my new cherry writing desk is glorious, without the chemical whiff of whiteboard markers, it just doesn't smell like September this year.

The Chickens are Restless

I got up at 3:30 this morning in order to get some words in the bank before the events of the day slowly and inevitably gobble up my writing time. I'm doing the single mom thing for a week while my husband is out of town for work, and the start of school has introduced all sorts of unexpected trips to the the dreaded commercial area near my (very) rural home.

I am also nursing a post-surgical Labrador Retriever, which has turned out to be a much bigger job than anticipated. She needed an ACL repair (start saving your pennies now, dog owners) and to have a "foreign body removal." Said foreign body was a horrifyingly large section of a stick that got jammed up into her leg via the space between her toes one day last January. We were out skate skiing (well, she was running; she can't seem to work the skis and poles) and she suddenly started limping. I could not find anything in her paw, so I figured she'd poked herself or pulled a muscle. We headed home, but when infection set in, she had two surgeries to remove a 1" piece of the stick. Our vet could not find any more, and nothing showed up on x-ray. Turns out, it jammed (sorry in advance, folks) so far up her leg - all the way up her hock - that neither the vet nor I thought to look there. The infection raged on, and she became weaker and weaker in her hind end, to the point that she needed to be carried up the stairs. I was referred to the amazing and affable Kurt Schulz of Peak Veterinary Referral Center in Williston, VT, who diagnosed bilateral ACL tears (ouch) and agreed to go looking for the foreign body while he was in there fixing her knees. He gave me a high-five when I returned to pick Abby up, and explained that it was hiding, nestled in her tendons and ligaments, and even gave me the stick as a souvenir. But not the quarter. He took all of my money and then some.

As I fine-tune Abby's pain meds, she oscilates between groggy and anxious, sometimes needing a sling for her undercarriage in order to go out to pee, other times needing a bit more sedation in order to protect her incision. The cat finds her relative stillness intriguing, and has taken this as an opportunity to fully investigate her smells and attack her listlessly wagging tail. She is not entertained, even if we find it endlessly amusing.

I awoke at 3 AM to a strange noise at the bottom of our stairs, and when I went down to investigate, found that it was the sound of Abby's elizabethan collar repeatedly smacking into the door and doorjam as Abby repeatedly attempted to cram her gigantic satellite-radio shaped head through the too-small opening.

Again, she was not amused, while I found it hilarious.

I let her out to pee (no sling this time, the pain meds had kicked in), and went to get a blanket so I could sleep next to her. She hates the elizabethan cone of shame and figured she'd sleep better without it, but that means I have to be nearby to stop her if she tries to lick her incisions.

Just as I was falling back asleep, an idea for my book hit, and I decided to get up and write rather than suffer an hour of deliberating whether or not to get up and write while trying to go back to sleep.

A couple of paragraphs in, the chickens started screeching and squacking. This is the sound I dread, the sound that wakes me from my dreams and makes me spring out of bed, race downstairs, and charge out into the backyard in bare feet and underwear. I will note that this is particularly unpleasant during a New Hampshire winter.

I just missed seeing the whateveritwas - I think a raccoon - run off with one of my favorite hens, a lovely golden-laced partridge. The rest of the biddies were scattered around the yard, running in all directions and clucking in terror as I tried to get a head count. Again, not entertaining for them, but objectively pretty funny when I'm not standing out in the back yard in my underwear and pissed off at whatever just snatched one of my hens for an early morning snack. Tim probably would have surreptitiously taken a video of it if he'd been in town.

The varmit had unraveled the chicken wire, made a 5" hole, reached in (I think), and pulled a hen out the hole. Feathers were stuck in the wire, and while I was still pissed off, I had to admire the varmit's perseverance. I've had chickens long enough to become philosophical about these things.

I chased down the chickens and got the remaining seven back into their coop, then hunted around for a spare piece of chicken wire so I could patch the coop until tomorrow, when I will have to spend an hour doing the permanent repairs. While I am at it, I should fix the rotten wood that's preventing the staples from holding the chicken wire securely, replace the perch that broke last week, and reinforce the wire that's disintegrated under the front end of the chicken run. If I budget my time tomorrow, I can get that done before taking Finn to a birthday party, shuttling Ben and some of his friends to a back-to-school party and soccer game, and attending a get-together I agreed to go to months ago. Hopefully, if I take a nap today (as is my habit on the weekends), I can get some writing time in tonight. Until then, here's the score:

Words written: 53

Chickens murdered: 1

Varmits vanquished: 0

Across the Atlantic

In my first weeks of summer, and therefore the beginning of my two-year adventure as a full-time writer (can you tell I like to type those words? Full-time writer. They have a certain loveliness and poetry.) I've been busy. Here's what's going on over at the Atlantic. You can read the rest of the article and check out the 200-odd (and I do mean odd) comments here.

Following Tom Ryan

I have wanted to be a full-time, real-live, professional writer my entire life. This week - today, actually - my dreams came true. Today was the first day of my full-time writing career, and I wanted to mark this occasion by reprinting (thank you, Cassie Jones at HarperCollins) a little bit of the P.S. section of the paperback edition of Following Atticus: Forty-eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship by Tom Ryan. For those writers out there who like to read what amounts to publishing porn, you can find the salacious details of the story in "When Opportunity Knocks: Anatomy of a Viral Post" Part I, Part II, and Part III. Yes, it takes three installments to tell the tale. 

I don't remember if Tom found my writing first or if I found Tom's, but I do remember that we found each other on Twitter. We tweeted, then we emailed, and we built a friendship. One day, he called me up and asked me to write the author interview and introduction to the P.S. section of his paperback edition. He had plenty of other offers to write that section, from authors far, far more well-known than I, but he knew I got his book.

Despite the fact that we both live in New Hampshire, and we both love to hike, I don't get to see Tom very often, as he's a private, quiet kind of guy, and I respect that. I do, however, want to take this opportunity to thank him for his faith in me. Faith that I could write part of his book, and faith that someday, we would both be full-time, real-live, professional writers. 

Introduction to an Interview with Tom Ryan

I have always been a sucker for a good coming of age story; tales of adventure, trials, and spiritual epiphany fuel my mind, my soul, and my teaching. These are our stories; the tales of humankind’s journey through the world, into the wilderness, and back home again. These are the stories I tell my children and my students. Stories of heroes who step out of ordinary lives and, despite the obstacles in their path, achieve the extraordinary.

When my copy of Following Atticus arrived in the mail, I dropped my briefcase on the floor of my mudroom, sat on the nearest chair, and opened to the introduction. The first passage I read was Tom’s description of Atticus, a lone figure atop Wildcat Mountain: “He is Frodo Baggins, he is Don Quixote; he is Huck Finn. He is every unlikely hero who ever took a step out of the door and found himself swept up in adventure.”

When I read that passage, I knew. I had found a kindred spirit. Two, actually.

Heroes are not necessarily the stuff of summer blockbusters and caped crusaders. Sometimes, they are just a man and his small dog doing what they know is right. Doing what they are meant to do.

Tom writes that Following Atticus, “…is not the end of a book but nearly a chapter.” In the following interview, I ask Tom about the new direction his life has taken since the book’s release, the obstacles he and Atticus have encountered in the world beyond the White Mountains, and the paths these two unlikely heroes have explored in search of their next chapter.

For more, including my interview with Tom Ryan, see the P.S. section of Following Atticus: Forty-eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

I Can No Other Answer Make, But Thanks, and Thanks.

I teach my students to send thank you notes. My mother taught me to send thank you notes, and I am teaching my own children to do the same, so it only seems fitting that I should educate my students about the emotional weight of a sincere thank you.

A few years ago, I heard Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg comment in a radio interview - or maybe it was someone commenting on Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg - on the importance of thank you notes. Apparently, Jackie taught them to send thank you notes without fail, and even today, Jackie and Caroline's thank you notes are cherished for their warmth and sincerity, not to mention their historical significance.

So when I sold my book, currently titled The Gift of Failure, to HarperCollins, I set out to convey my gratitude. To every teacher, coach, pastor, parent, administrator, blogger, and reporter who caused the article "Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail," originally published at the Atlantic, to go viral.

The piece was published on a Tuesday, it was "viral" by Wednesday, and by the following week, the trajectory of my life had changed. Suddenly, pipe dreams were reality by the end of that month, I found myself with my dream agent and a book deal.

Therefore, I owe a hell of a lot of people thank you notes.

Every day, after school is over, and before my evening begins, I spend about an hour figuring out who shared my article, who took the time to tell their friends and colleagues about my writing.

I try to send real, snail mail notes, but you can't imagine how hard it is to find physical addresses for bloggers and reporters these days. School districts, yes. I can address something to a particular teacher or coach, care of their school district, but it's hard to get email addresses, let alone physical addresses, for most people.

Blogging Tip: If you'd like to be contacted with ideas, thank you notes, or free books, please make an address available. At the very least an email address, but even better, a physical address. Even if it's a PO box.

Gratitude, conveyed with sincerity and care, is underestimated in our society, but it's such a gift. It's been challenging to teach my children about its worth, mainly because developmentally, children are often such self-centered, empathy-challenged narcissists. But I will keep pounding away at that particular lesson until it gets through.

Because over a lifetime, there will be so many people to thank.

Doing the Hokey Pokey

I know I am supposed to be able to tell the difference, but I am not sure if I'm leaning in or leaning out. Leaning out from what, and into what? Leaning into my writing, leaning out of teaching? Leaning into my family, leaning out of the complex details of a home/work compromise? I don't know. I'm simply leaning in and out as I have done over the past fourteen years of my parenting life, as needed, doing the hokey pokey. Right hand in, right hand out. Left foot in, left foot out.

K.J. Dell'Antonia's new feature at Motherlode, "How I Do It" inspired me to really think about precisely how I do it - nay, how my entire family does it - and realistically evaluate my family and professional life as new pressures arrive on the horizon. I happen to have a very supportive husband, but even my supportive husband needs his early morning hours to work out and his evening hours to conduct meetings, so I tend to stick closer to home and deal with many of our kids' appointments. I work within three miles of my house and he works twenty miles away, so we make compromises based on geography and scheduling.

When I sold my book to HarperCollins earlier this year, I sincerely believed I could continue to function as both a teacher and a writer. I am a teacher. Ergo, I teach. I am a writer. Ergo, I write. How hard could it be to put those two lives into delineated boxes? I can teach 50% of the time and write 50% of the time. When I announced this brilliant plan to my employers and my family, I considered myself enlightened and brilliant. Easy, peasy.

But wait. What if my classes are spread all throughout the day, and I can't get away from school? My prep day is Wednesday, and in my experience, students ask me questions all day long, even if my door is closed. I can ask to consolidate my classes in certain hours of the day, but the school schedule is complicated...

Fine. I will leave campus, even for an hour or two, off to my local library. I love my local library. Coffee, fireplace, quiet...

But what about advisory? Even part time teachers have advisors - I already have four of them, three of whom will really need me next year, and I will be expected to take on two or three more.  I meet with them during my free periods, which will fall during my free periods, which are...well, I can figure that scheduling out later.

And what about faculty meetings and meetings for advisory? There goes Wednesday afternoon. Wednesdays are dedicated to two long meetings - talking about our advisees and meeting as a faculty to learn and discuss and debate. But that's only until 3:30 or 4, at which time I can return home and do the dump duty (our dump is only open two days a week) and clean up and make dinner, and once my younger kid is asleep, I can write. Except that my older kid needs me in the evening. That's when he talks to us about what upsets him and thrills him and motivates him. And then I get to sleep around ten.

Wait? Where did my writing time go? And how is my teenager going to get to and from his high school, about fifteen miles away from our house, without the benefit of public transportation? My husband works twelve-hour days, so where will dinner come from and who will make it? Who will deal with the laundry? Dog? Chickens? Rabbits? Gardens? Lunches? Dust bunnies? Toilets? How will it all get done?

I spent an entire week bound up in anxiety attacks at three A.M. and got out of bed for walks around my neighborhood at five A.M., but no matter how many times I re-arranged my priorities and rationalized my personal days, I was flummoxed. 50% + 50% = 100% Except when 50% really = 100% and 50% really =100% and I still have not figured my family and household and orthodontist and sports and transportation into the equation.

Finally, after a week of little sleep and a lot of nausea, I asked my amazing and supportive 21st century husband to weigh in. He'd been reluctant to tell me what to do, believing that I'd find my own balance (does he not KNOW me after twenty years?).

He told me what he'd do in my position, and when he was honest with me, my gut relaxed for the first time in weeks.

I was able to breathe because my gut knew what my brain did not - that I can NOT do everything, no matter how much I want to believe I can.

Two weeks ago, I announced my intention to take two years off from teaching. I cried. And cried. I can not imagine anyone else teaching my students and felt as if I had betrayed their trust. I teach my students for three years in a row, and they count on me to be there for them, to mentor them and prepare them for high school. However, I have only these two years to write and promote a book that I believe in. A book I hope will influence the education and well-being of parents and children around the world. I only get one grab at that brass ring, and I don't intend to squander that opportunity. After I have ushered that book from brain to paper to reader, I will return to the classroom, because I am a teacher, and that's what I do. In the meantime, I am at the top of the substitute teaching list at Crossroads, and I will be guest teaching at a couple of different schools next year.

Parents engage in the hokey pokey dance of parenting and career every day. We lean in when we have to and lean out when circumstances dictate. The leaning out is understood in the press as leaning out from professional life, but some lives are not so easily categorized. I lean in and out simultaneously, and in my leaning out and in, I keep my life in balance. At the moment, my feet are securely planted under this precariously balanced life, and that's the only way I can move forward.

Luck Be a Lady

Last week, I wrote about the fact that I was tempted to get chickens again. I admit it. I missed their presence. I was all about chickens for years, until a marauding weasel ate them all over one 18-hour period. I used to write a blog about farming and chickens, and my old business card even featured a chicken. A chicken with a quill pen.

I wrote an entire book about all of that farming and chicken stuff called The Education of a Flatlander. It did not get published, which was a good thing. That book stunk as much as my chicken's manure, but it did give me experience in writing a 70,000-word book. That may seem like a middling accomplishment, writing a crappy book that never got published, but when I have another 70,000-word book due in a mere six months, I'm glad I've written a book before. That book is more than just a compilation of words; that book represents an arc, a structure, my experience as a writer.

But back to the chicken thing. I had a gorgeous flock - a flock, perfected. One Black Australorp, an Arucana or two, a couple of Buff Orpingtons, a Silver Laced Wyandotte and a Barred Rock. Yes, they all had names, and they were gorgeous in their diversity.

And then a weasel ate them all while we were away for the weekend. Our neighbor's daughter discovered the carnage, and while I think she's survived the trauma, it's not something you want your average five-year-old to stumble upon after breakfast. I swore off chickens for a year or two. I simply could not handle the stress and disappointment. I even adopted rabbits that used the chicken tractor space - the most gorgeous chicken tractor ever, designed and built by my father for my 40th birthday.

But as this spring grew into summer, it seemed criminal not to fill that lovely chicken tractor with my own chickens. Just a few. I pushed the urge aside for as long as I could, and then I went to my friendly neighborhood farmer, Betty Sue Robie, and asked if she might just have a few extra chickens this year, four or so that she might be able to part with for a price. She admitted that she had a couple of "wandering" Hy-line reds who were driving her nuts; I was practically doing her a favor to take those garden mauraders off her hands.

Last night, she collected a couple of the wanderers from their night-time roosts, and this morning, I became a chicken farmer again.

They are not used to confinement, and are still figuring out where to lay their eggs, but we'll get along fine. They will satisfy my need to have chickens, to have eggs, and to have a disposal system for our kitchen scraps. The rabbits will be fine in their smaller, more modest, rabbit tractor.

And now I deserve that image of a chicken with a pen in its mouth. I do love that chicken graphic and the writer she represents, not to mention the graphic designer who first dreamed her up. That chicken, trotting about my yard with a pen in her mouth represents those years when I struggled through my first 70,000-word manuscript.

My next manuscript is due November 1. I will write it in the company of my chickens, my rabbits, and the creatures who ushered my first manuscript into being. And that feels just about right.

When Opportunity Knocks: Anatomy of a Viral Post, Part III

I know, I know. I promised the next installment of my story “tomorrow,” but as often happens, circumstances intervened.

So…where was I? Ah, yes, after Part I, and Part II, Laurie finally agreed to be my agent. Oh, and Laurie read my last post and reminded me that due to a miscommunication, she was under the impression that I had already signed with an agent when I contacted her about the possibility of working with her after “Why Parents Need toLet Their Children Fail” went viral. So there’s another lesson: when approaching an agent – particularly the ethical ones – make sure they know you don’t already have an agent. Oops.

The evening after I signed with Laurie, I sat down with my laptop, a bunch of books about how to write a nonfiction book proposal (that I’d already read about fifty times), all the accumulated scraps of paper around my side of the bed bearing my late-night ideas, and the pages of notes I’d taken during my phone call with Laurie, and began to write the proposal for what would later be called The Gift of Failure. I had a blueprint for a nonfiction proposal from a friend who had successfully landed an agent based on her [compelling and amazing] proposal, so I worked from that example.

Four days later, I’d banged out a first draft of the proposal and sent it off to Laurie. My favorite concerns included a clever title and the overview, but Laurie kindly and oh-so-supportively pointed out that we had bigger fish to fry in the short term. Phooey. I really liked my very clever, yet altogether unclear titles.

Two or three days later, the proposal came back with edits. Lots of them. Lots and lots and lots of them. I am used to markup from editors, and have had the privilege to work with some really amazing, smart, and effective editors like K.J. Dell’Antonia, Robert Pondiscio, and Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, but Laurie was a whole different kind of editor. She was editing for content, of course, but she was also editing for style, and with a much larger vision in mind. She was editing for approaches and angles I had not even considered, and I had to admit that every single one of her suggestions improved my first draft by leaps and bounds. Some sections had so many changes and re-arrangements that Laurie even suggested I hide the tracked changes and read it fresh. That was a good tip.

Passes two and three went pretty quickly, and by the end of that week, we had a final draft and had scheduled a phone call to talk strategy. Laurie retreated to her war room over the weekend to plan which editors would receive our submission, and I waited for the master to reveal her master plan. On Monday, Laurie unveiled her list, and the proposal went out to a list of thirteen or fourteen editors.

Within a day of submission, we knew we were going to have an auction. An auction can happen when more than one editor is interested, and we had at least three or four interested in talking to me and, if all went well, bidding. Laurie had promised daily submission updates at around six every evening, but between the pre-empts (hold on, I will get there) and the large number of editors interested, she was often in contact three or four times a day. By the end of the week, Laurie was able to assess the field, and there were eleven or twelve publishers in the mix, and Laurie had begun the process of setting up phone calls with the editors.

Here’s where I finally came to understand how good Laurie is: she asked for my schedule, and I sent her my very complicated schedule that includes both my daily class schedule my myriad kid-related obligations. Laurie scheduled my calls with the editors between my classes and after school, and a couple of days before I was to speak with the editors, she sent me a dossier for each. She detailed that editor’s recent acquisitions, of course, but for many of the editors, I knew the details of their interests, education, children’s names, their spouses’ occupations, and any other tidbits that I might find helpful to my conversation. I had acquaintances in common with many of the editors, and it was incredibly reassuring to have more than enough information to feel comfortable during the phone call.

Editor phone calls are exhausting. They reminded me a lot of parent-teacher conferences, actually, because I had to be my very best, most impressive, charismatic and personable self for long stretches of time. Each phone call lasted roughly an hour, with about three or four minutes in between to stretch my legs and get a drink of water. Laurie wanted me to email her after each call, but the timing was often so tight thanks to my full-time teaching schedule that I had to dash off a quick one- or two-line email before the phone rang again.

My favorite part of this process was the accumulated list of phone numbers on my phone’s caller ID memory. I often use this feature of my home phone to call my friends and family because I’m frankly too lazy to commit these numbers to memory, and it’s easier to simply scroll through for the number I need. I think my phone holds around 20 numbers, and that’s usually enough to hold the numbers of the people who call me most often. That week, however, all the big names in the publishing industry were in there, punctuated by my parents’ home phone number and my friends’ cell phone numbers. I was a little trippy.

I did thirteen editor phone calls over five days. And here’s the thing – all of these women were amazing. Yes, they were all women, and despite the salesmanship being slung about, I could tell that given different circumstances, I could be friends with each and every one of them. There wasn’t one phone call that worried me. Sure, there were some I loved more than others – one phone call prompted me to email Laurie mid-call and admit to loving her so much I feared I might already be pregnant with her baby – but overall, these were smart and nice women. So good for you, publishing industry. You’ve got some cool women there.

So back to pre-empts. Pre-empts happen when a publisher wants to offer a number big enough that they might just be able to snag the book early and avoid an auction. Kind of like "Buy it Now" on Ebay. From what I have learned, however, auctions are good for authors and agents. If you’ve ever been to an estate auction, you’ve seen it. It gets competitive, and people get invested either due to an emotional attachment or pride, and all of that drives the price up. The first pre-empt came during a conversation with my mother-in-law about what to eat for dinner. Laurie presented it to me, as an agent must, and then EMPHATICALLY and with great forcefulness, encouraged me to turn it down. Which I did, with trembling fingers. The first pre-empt was almost three times what I had ever dared to hope for. Late at night, when my husband and I allowed ourselves to talk about possible advance amounts if I ever sold my book, we never even dared to go near this first pre-empt number. That number was just crazy talk. 

The second pre-empt came during a dinner out, again with my in-laws, who were visiting for a long weekend. I swallowed hard and followed Laurie’s advice, rejecting that offer as well.

More pre-empts came in, some as what Laurie termed “valentines,” or numbers that were perfectly lovely, but meant to show a good faith commitment to the purchase of my book more than anything else. 

Again, yow. What if interest soured? The auction would have no floor bid – or entry level number at which the auction had to begin – so what if the bidders came in super-low and the bidding never went as high as the pre-empt? What did I know? I’ve never been in this position before.

The auction was set for Wednesday, March 27. Initial bids were due in by 11 AM, and we had eleven editors committed to bid. The first bid came in at well below the pre-empt amounts and I was fairly sure I’d been an idiot. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. But Laurie anticipated my freakout. “First bid! (Just a reminder, opening bids are strategic, not necessarily indicative.)” Reassuring, but still…I was at school that day and did my best to stay calm and not freak out on the kids. Not a lot of grading got done that day. I was too afraid to subject my students' work to my fractured concentration and marginal hold on sanity. 

My auction was a round-robin style auction, in which everyone bids, and then the lowest bidder is informed of the highest bid, which they can either top or they can drop out of the auction. Each bid took at least an hour to come in, because Laurie would call the editor, they would say they had to think about it or talk to someone, and then they would call her back. Each interval between bids went on forever, and I put some serious wear and tear on my laptop mouse pad, what with all that refreshing of my email inbox.

I actually had lost track of which publisher was which editor, and what we talked about on the phone, so I had all of those lovely dossiers from Laurie printed out, with my notes scrawled all over them, and I had to keep referring back to them to figure out who was in and who was out. As editors dropped out, I filed the dossiers away. I also cleaned obsessively when I was at home. My house has never been cleaner. I cleaned inside drawers, closets, the rabbit hutch.

At the end of the first day, we were nowhere near done. The auction would go to Thursday, and as Friday was Good Friday, I was concerned that this thing could go in to the following week, and I’d be dead of nervous exhaustion by then. By the time Thursday was almost out, we still had six editors in the mix, so Laurie checked to make sure everyone was going to be available to bid on Friday, and we were good to go for a third day. We started Friday with five bidders, and as Crossroads Academy was not in session that day, I had all the freedom in the world to obsess about the auction and nothing else. I warned Laurie that I was running out of things to clean. I had even cleaned the dog's teeth and ears.

By afternoon on Friday, we were down to three editors, and it all came down to two in the waning moments before the close of day. In the end, the top three or four bidders were all editors I adored, and as I had final say on who I wanted to work with (I could even pick editors who had dropped out days before), I was able to relax a little.

In the end, I went with the editor that felt right for me. The difference between the top bidder and the three or four lower bidders was insignificant enough that I was free to review my notes, talk things out with Laurie, and go with my gut and heart rather than the highest bid.

I chose Gail Winston, of HarperCollins for her expertise, smarts, body of work, and our phone call. She had been at the top of my list from the very beginning, and my phone call with her only reinforced what I’d heard of her from other writers and agents.

So the ride begins. My manuscript delivery date is this fall, with publication slated for fall of 2014. My life has already changed in many ways, and I’m simply excited for the coming adventure. This week will be one of firsts – my first photo shoot, my first editor meeting, my first visit to a publisher, my first time purchasing more than one [discounted] item of clothing at a time (for the aforementioned photo shoot).

And I am grateful. Extremely grateful.