Stick-to-it-iveness and a Giveaway!

Roseanna M. White pens her novels under the Betsy Ross flag hanging above her desk, with her Jane Austen action figure watching over her. When she isn’t writing fiction, she’s editing it for WhiteFire Publishing or reviewing it for the Christian Review of Books, both of which she co-founded with her husband.

On her website, you can learn how to create your own spy name, and don’t forget to enter in her massive Box of Secrets giveaway!

I’m what my agent fondly refers to as “an idea gal.” I’ve got enough of them filed away in my IDEAS folder to keep me busy for a long, long time. And yet…so often after I finished one project, I would flounder around, wondering what in the world I should work on next.

Frankly, it got even worse after I learned I had a contract on my first big-press book, the colonial-set (or rather, just-after-the-American-Revolution-set) Love Finds You in Annapolis, Maryland. For the first time, I had deadlines and release dates that someone other than me set. And from learning of contract to release date was only 9 months apart. Once the emotional high wore off, the panic set in. And it took the form of a very simple question:

That, you see, is always the big question for a writer. It’s never about getting that one contract. It’s about building a whole career from it. So where could I go from there? I tossed out a few other ideas to Summerside, Annapolis‘s publisher, but they could only offer me vague “that might be nice someday” sentiments. So I sat down, I stared at my IDEAS folder. And I realized that none of it–absolutely none of it–worked as a follow-up to Annapolis. None had similar settings. None would require a similar voice. And that was kinda depressing.

But I’m the idea gal! I knew I could come up with something! So I trotted my little self down the stairs and said, “Hey, honey! You remember that episode of Decoded we watched, with that spy ring thingy-mabob during the Revolution? What was that called?”

My hubby: “The Culper Ring.”

Me: “Thanks!”

Daughter: “Moooommmmmmyyyyyyy!”

Me, two hours later when I get to my computer: “Um….honey! What was that again??”

LOL, yes, my husband had to remind me about five times what the ring was called before I finally got around to looking them up and bookmarking the page. 😉 I figured another book set within 5 years of Annapolis would be a perfect follow-up. A perfect way to build a following. It wouldn’t work for the Love Finds You line, probably, but I really liked the idea. I read some articles online and liked them even more.

Excited, I emailed an editor I’d been chatting with. “What would you think,” I wrote, “about a Revolutionary spy romance?”

She emailed promptly back. “Oo, sorry! Siri Mitchell has one of those coming out next year!”

It was like somebody punched me. My great idea…and a bestselling, award-winning author had already beaten me to it. Le sigh. Le double sigh. Le boo-hoo-hoo. That was when I emailed Stephanie, totally down, with the bad news that those hours of brainstorming we had just put in were useless. I believe her response was something like, “Aw, seriously? Do you have to give it up entirely?” (Stephanie here: Note to self – be more eloquent when talking to Roseanna. My words might show up in a guest post…)

Given that I had no one else to pitch it to, I figured I did. At the time, my agent was mostly retired, she wasn’t pursuing anything new for me, but I was afraid to cut totally loose from her. Which meant I was on my own in making connections. And they’d pretty much all tapered off.

Until, a month or so later – a rejection came in.

Yep. A rejection on a contemporary manuscript I’d submitted a year and a half earlier (a year and a half!)…and followed up on a year afterward…with an editor who also had six other proposals of mine that she hadn’t looked at…she emailed to say she’d taken my contemporary to committee but gotten a “no” because of genre. I wasn’t terribly surprised by the rejection. While I’d clicked nicely with the editor at a conference in 2009, she’d said up front that Harvest House wasn’t really doing this type of contemporary. And honestly, I wasn’t sure Harvest House would like my stories anyway–their stuff tends toward the sweet, and mine…doesn’t always.

But, well, nothing ventured…I replied with, “Hey, I have this idea for a historical, following a spy ring during the Revolution. Would you be interested?”

She replied with an enthusiastic yes and invited me to submit when I had a proposal finished. I was still a good ways out from that, though. I had a manuscript to turn in to Summerside, and then I had to do some serious research. So I did. I wrote the proposal. I sent it to my critique group. Their responses were mostly positive, but with concerns about the amount of suspense…and the amount of backstory…and the way the heroine came off…

At this point, I was beginning to feel a bit discouraged. I had one book coming out aside from my small-press biblicals, but would that be it? Was I going to totally ruin my one shot at this story? Unsure how it would go, I made the changes I could to the proposal based on my critters’ feedback, and I composed a new email to the editor.

I remember hovering with my mouse over the SEND button, thinking, “Is it good enough? Or is it awful? Should I wait? No, there’s nothing more I can do to it. And she won’t read it for months anyway, so if I come up with something else, I’ll just send her an updated file.” I clicked.

An hour later, I got an email from Kim at Harvest House. I opened it up, expecting it to say, “Got it, thanks.” It didn’t. It said, “Read the proposal. Can we chat? Our toll free number is…”

That would be when my hands started shaking. When my pulse skyrocketed. When my palms went damp. Because I knew well an editor wouldn’t ask me to call just to tell me she hated my proposal. I called Kim, listened to her gush about how much she loved the story…I called my agent to share, and got a quick response of, “Roseanna, dear, it’s time to find a new agent. I’ll put in a few calls for you.” In the next two weeks, I talked on the phone with three of the top agents in the CBA and ended up signing with the legendary Karen Ball, who had just gone from editing to agenting (she’s the one who discovered Francine Rivers and Karen Kingsbury–just sayin’). And I kept writing. 

I sent it in several chunks to an ever-more-excited Kim. And learned that she, for the second time in her 15 years at Harvest House, was taking it to committee without having read the full book. So in the fall of 2011, I got the email–they had bought the series. My first series!

And you just can’t believe how many times I almost gave up on this–the idea that had already been done (though very differently), the idea that my critique group wasn’t totally sold on, the idea that had only one shot. The idea I loved, and which ended up getting better responses from agents and editors than anything I’d ever tried to pitch before. And to think I sold it to an editor I’d met a year and a half earlier, and who rejected my first project…

Well, in this business, you just never know. 😉 But now the Culper Ring Series is well under way. Ring of Secrets is available, Whispers from the Shadows (book 2) has been turned in, and I’m working on the final installment now.

The character is my heroine’s brother, who died fighting for the Union at Gettysburg. Though he isn’t actually in the story, he’s mentioned over and over again, as he was my heroine’s best friend–and the promises he made her and another character make are a major plot point. My only condition is that it be a name appropriate to 1865, and that it not be one I’ve already used elsewhere in the series. 😉

(The book is available to U.S. residents only due to the unfortunate realities of expensive international shipping. This giveaway closes on Friday the 22nd.)