What Now?
November 13, 2025
The question I’ve been asked the most since getting agent representation and going on submission with publishers has been, “What now?!” Well, the short answer is, “Now I wait.”
The literary industry is BUSY. It’s a living breathing thing. Agents and publishers alike wake up every day to dozens of new emails in their inbox. More inquiries, more submissions, follow-ups, full manuscripts. Piles and piles of material to read through and consider. The best thing I can do right now is to sit tight and practice what I’ve been learning how to hone since starting this traditional publication journey, patience. And the thing is, knowing I’ve got someone in my corner to represent me definitely makes that wait a whole heck of a lot easier! Now I have someone who believes in my story telling ability and in my current manuscript who ALSO knows the industry and how best to market this novel to publishers.
Just as agents are all looking to be moved, inspired, and wowed by a manuscript that fell into their lap at just the right time and written in a way that speaks to them, editors at publishing houses are looking for the same. The first batch of editors my agent has submitted to may be looking for something different to represent, and that’s okay. The next batch may have better luck. Some people respond right away to let the agent know they’ve received the submission, a far greater number only reply when they have the chance to read the submission in full. Typically you can expect to hear back from editors in 6-8 weeks. So many individual and unique circumstances come into play when considering the submission timeline and that’s not even factoring in the holiday season. We are going into a very slow season for the industry, for the world even. I for one am having to shift my focus to plan for things like family visits, holidays, and my kids school vacation schedules. It goes without saying the same is true for publishing houses and editors.
So, what am I doing in the meantimes? Well, while I love writing and certainly intend to start drafting my next outlined novel soon, I’m mostly focused on my family, my school schedule, substitute teaching, and just, well, life! Authorship sort of falls into the same category of “hurry up and wait” that the military life does. Luckily for me, I’m well versed in that way of life and I’m happy to hang in there while I await feedback.
Something worth mentioning, and I’m not sure if this is the standard for lit agencies, but my agent has created a spreadsheet for my submissions that she’s shared with me so that I can check in on where things are at. She does this with all her authors and it’s honestly the absolute best. I don’t have to bug her to stay informed. This definitely helps ease my mind and help me to not feel in the dark while I wait.
Anyway, I expect to start drafting my next manuscript in the new year, but for now I’m just hanging out and enjoying where I’m at. It took so long to get here, I really just want to revel in it a bit while I await feedback. Fingers crossed this manuscript sparks interest with publishers. It’s one I believe the world would absolutely benefit from reading.
What I’m Currently Working on and Why It Matters
October 29, 2025
I can’t speak too much on my current manuscript just yet, as it’s on submission with publisher right now, but I wanted to take a minute to tease what I can because this story is deeply rooted in truth. Not just my truth, but the truth of marriage. The truth of motherhood. The truth of love in the trenches of those truths. I sought out a lot of insight from fellow mom friends before beginning this project to determine what were the most important elements to include in this story. The goal was for it to feel relatable to as many spouses and parents as possible. And I believe I’ve accomplished that.
Here are a few of my main reasons for why I decided to write this story and why I believe it matters.
The World’s Unrealistic Standards for Mothers:
Real talk, it is actually NOT possible to have it all or do it all: in general, but especially as a mother. To become a parent, and more specifically, a mother, you are choosing to make very specific sacrifices and I truly believe these things need to be talked about because they’re true whether we acknowledge them or not. And, to be clear, sacrifices aren’t a BAD thing, but they’re hard. It’s HARD to put certain goals or dreams on hold while you focus on raising your kids. It’s HARD to learn to love your body again after kids, especially if you weren’t the best at loving it before. It’s HARD to find the energy for ourselves and our marriages when we’ve got little ones running around.
All of this is only made harder by the fact that our society seems to HIGHLY under value the role of mothers. This goes for all moms, by the way. Working, stay-at-home, single, small business owning. All mothers have a very unique value in their home and unique challenges on top of that depending on their own personal situation.
I was eager to create a story that acted as a reminder that being a mom is hard enough. Being the soft place your family lands is a full-time job. And, while not all mothers have the ability or desire to make it their ONLY full-time job, that doesn’t minimize how big and important the job is across the board.
In short, this story is a love letter to mothers.
I Wanted to Romanticize Marriage Because, Guess What, It IS Romantic:
In most love stories marriage only ever makes it to the epilogue. If you’re lucky the story is told as flashbacks from an aging couple’s fond memories of how their love story began. But in general, you’re usually watching the main characters meet and fall in love for the first time or all over again after being reunited. Rarey if ever are you reading about an established married couple. Not as a love story anyway. Unfortunately, I worry this “keep the marriage in the epilogue” trend can end up sending a very harmful—though unintentional—message that married love isn’t interesting enough to make it past the epilogue . But that’s just not true.
This book is my “marriage after the epilogue” story. It’s about an aged, familiar, and in need of repair kind of love, that—despite all of those things—isn’t even close to being hopeless.
What I Craved More of in Fiction:
I’ve always said, I write what I want to read and that continues to be true with this project. Put simply, there’s just not enough marriage in-crisis stories out there. Or, at least, I’ve struggled to find them. Sure, there are novels about failing marriages or finding love after divorce. There are books about infidelity and self-discovery. There are even novels that I’ve read and loved about marriage in crisis. But what I haven’t found yet—and am always open to book recs of—is marriage in-crisis with young children. Mothers and wives who love and value those roles, but have somehow lost themselves within them.
I wanted to tell a really authentic story that felt familiar, like talking to a close friend and finding hope in those relatable struggles we all face from time to time within marriage and family.
An Escape That Feels Like Self-Discovery:
I’ve read so many books about a character who travels somewhere beautiful and exotic and finds herself along the way. “P.S. I Love You” “Under the Tuscan Sun,” and “Eat, Pray, Love” come to mind. Upon turning the final page, however, I always found myself yearning for a similar feeling. I wanted to have such an experience. I wanted to find myself. But by the time I read any of these books I was married already and had “missed my window” to escape to some far off place to learn who I was on some Italian or Irish countryside. And that’s not a bad thing, but it left me thinking, what kind of book can mothers and wives read that will leave them feeling excited about a tangible opportunity to discover themselves as well as their marriage again?
That was the aim of this story. While the characters are fictional, their struggles are ordinary enough to be relatable to most and for good reason. I wanted readers to feel inspired to take the lessons they read about in this novel and apply them to their own marriages and motherhood. Additionally, the “escape” in this story is, dare I say, attainable. While the story, characters, and locations are all specific, I wanted to leave plenty of room for readers to design their own interpretation of the story so that they can easily apply what they read to their own life.
Whenever I write a new book, I always try to picture what its role in my collection of stories will be. Some are meant to heal or inspire. All of them are meant to touch my readers deeply. I think if this story had a job, it would be to turn readers’s eyes onto their own life and marriage or what their view of marriage is and see hope where maybe it had faded away and excitement where boredom threatens to unravel the beauty that’s been there all along.
My Rocky Road to Authorship
October 28, 2025
So often you hear about the “natural writers” within the community. The “literary athletes” who have been writing since they could hold a pen. You hear about the raw talent and the avid readers who eventually, and inevitably, took to writing. But my story starts out in stark contrast to those of my peers who were “born to write.”
I was the kid who struggled to read and at times, even to speak. As a twin, I had my own language for the first five years of my life. If my sister could understand me, I didn’t care who else could. (In many ways, that’s still true.) I needed help with speech and I struggled academically. I was an average student who only got A’s in gym and art class. I was lucky to get a B in English and got C’s in most everything else.
It wasn’t until I got to college (Community College, mind you) that I started doing well in school. While I had a brief unit in middle school of creative writing that sparked unexpected interest in story-telling, it was fleeting. But in college I found a confidence in my writing abilities as I got one A paper in English after another. I’m honestly not sure where the shift happened and no one was more surprised than I was that I was getting passing grades on research papers, let alone A’s. I’m certain my writing was still weak, but I started to trust the rhythm that was my ability to weave words together.
When I started reading for fun—for the first time in my life—the urge to write my own stories followed quickly thereafter. It was a desire and a calling that felt awakened. It was during that time that I wrote my first full-length novel. My twin sister also took that time to explore novel writing and it was in this time that the origin story of my novel “Broken” was born of her hand.
A short time later in January of 2009, I got married to my high school sweetheart and hopped a plane to Germany to live with him. It was then, during my husband’s year-long deployment and my time living abroad, that my first official chapter of authorship began.
It goes without saying, with such poor grades throughout my formative years, that my ability to master the English language was still ROUGH at times. It wasn’t uncommon for me to combine tenses in a single paragraph, failing to see or fully grasp the difference between past and present tense narratives. Grammar was an even bigger challenge and my poor spelling ability reared its ugly head regularly. With those first few novels the stories were there, the intention but not necessarily the execution. They were unpolished fever dreams of good intentions and sub-par writing for a long time.
Back then, self-publishing was not viewed as a worthy route and was often criticized and looked down upon in the literary community. I didn’t have the resources or finances to get a manuscript edited and I BARELY knew what I was doing. So, I wrote anyway. From 2010 to 2013, I wrote and self-published 5 novels. While I’ve since unpublished these novels, it’s not due to shame, merely a desire to separate the seasons of my authorship.
I view those first five novels as my self-education in authorship and I cherish them all deeply. In fact, my latest novel “Healing in the Heartland” is a re-write of one of my earlier novels, “The Wanderer” and I’m open to doing more re-writes in the future. That’s the thing about writing I love so much. Once you create characters, they become real and everlasting. Once you breathe them into existence with your words, they can’t be unwritten even when a book is no longer in circulation.
All this to say, you may not be a “natural,” but that doesn’t mean you’re less deserving or capable of writing the stories written on your heart. The key is being willing to suck a little. Be willing to be bad at it. Get excited about tripping your way down the literary path and learning the hard way what to avoid, finding the way through the weeds if by chance or destiny, and not because the path was clear and plainly set out before you. Be willing to get lost and fall down as you test your wobbly legs and build muscles you never knew you had. Be willing to earn it, to fight for it.
You are no less deserving than the over-night sensations. You are no less deserving than the viral authors or the protégés within the industry. Your story has value and no one can tell it but you. So, be authentic, be honest, be brave in bringing your characters to life. Someone out there needs your stories.