Dreams Really Do Come True

Almost two months ago I pushed a button and made my publishing dreams come true. It was the proudest moment of my life. Pushing that button meant that I was no longer waiting for a too white publishing world to look down on this lowly black woman writer and decide that I was worth taking a chance on. It meant that I was thrusting my work out into, what I hoped was a welcoming public, to be enjoyed by more than just my friends and family. I'll never forget seeing my book cover on Amazon for the first time. I thought my face would crack wide open from grinning. Shortly therewww.facebook.com/AngelaCrookAuthorafter, I set up my Facebook page, scheduled not one, but two book signings, sent out notices to all my friends and family, begging for their support, and I celebrated. Each and every sale, I celebrated. And now that all family and friends have brought their copy, some two, or three, or even six, and the sales have dried up. The exhilaration has faded, replaced with disappointment and self-doubt. Yes, reality has come to call. Now the real work begins. I'm ready.

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http://amzn.com/1517212405

Hooray! I'm a Writer.

Years after sitting down in  front of my computer in my quiet Shaker Square apartment, to write my first novel, I did it. I became a published writer. It didn't happen quite the way I had expected or dreamed all those years ago, but when I typed my name into Amazon and saw my book cover appear on the screen, that didn't matter one bit. S

omeone, somewhere parted with their hard earned money to read something that I wrote, and I hope they are loving it.
No, my dream agent never showed, and I wasn't offered a million dollar deal, and Morris Chestnut has not signed on to play the leading man in the movie adapted from my novel, but I am an official published author.
Self-Published, Independent, whichever you prefer, I am a published author, which means, that I didn't let the no become the end of my writing dreams. I didn't abandon my story to a drawer, regardless of how many times someone said, "they just didn't love it enough."
Soon reviews will start coming in, I hope. And all of them won't be good, I know, but it won't change the fact that I am now a published writer. Years of writing, and re-writing, and editing, and re-editing, hoping for a yes, crying over the no, wanting to quit, being pushed to keep forward, and finally, I am a published writer. If you have a story to tell, push the button, and become a published writer.

The End

The first time I typed the end, I was sitting alone in my apartment on Shaker Square in Cleveland, Ohio. The novel, named Fat Girl at the time, was 580 pages long. I wrote it in nine months five pages at a time. The only thing I knew about writing is what I learned in Stephen King's On Writing, writers write, everyday, at least five pages a day, and I was going to be a writer.
At the end of each night of writing, I would email my pages to my guinea pig group, a group of friends and family, who read along as I wrote with the same fervor as if I was writing their favorite soap opera. And when I typed that last sentence, we truly believed that it was done, complete, ready for publishing, ready to made into a movie. We even casted the movie, multiple times, ahh dreams.
After a bit of polishing, me and Kevin Smith, musician, sometime writer, and all the time friend, worked together, to write a really good query letter. After some research, that mostly included reading the description of literary agencies in Writer's Market, I started sending out queries.
Shockingly, especially knowing what I know now, a high profile agent name Deidre Knight of the Knight Agency responded and asked for the entire manuscript, which I gleefully sent, immediately, sure that I was about to become a superstar. I feel like I should mention that this was pre-digital, which meant 580 loose pages via snail mail.
I've never met her personally, frankly I would be embarrassed to, but I have to say that she must be one of the sweetest women in the world. Not only did she let me down gently, but if I'm not mistaken, she even recommended an agent she thought might be a good fit, he wasn't.Considering the lessons I've learned along the way, this lady was a virtual angel.
After recovering from this first rejection, I picked myself up, dusted myself off and submitted to many more agencies, learning to hide my tears a little better with each rejection. Then, finally, I took the first steps to learn how to write.

Everybody's Got A Dream

If you listen to interviews of any successful writer, they always talk about how they started writing, basically as an infant, and how they always dreamed of being a writer one day, but not me. Sure, I've always been a bookworm. A real one, the kind that stayed up all night and read by the light of the moon, the kind that reads while walking, and earned her pop bottle glasses by the light of the TV glare at 3:00 o'clock in the morning. Still, I never even considered that I could be writer, not even once upon a dream.
Then one day, well into my 30's, single, unsatisfied with my job, and life in general, buoyed by a group of friends and family, who soon became my first guinea pig group, I sat down to write a classic story of love, loss, and pizza.  Of course they may have been a little too generous, with their praise, but without them my writing dreams would have never gotten off the ground. 
More years later than I can even believe, I've joined the best writing group any aspiring writer could hope for. I've attended several prestigious writer's conferences, including Big Sur in California, NY Pitch, and Killer Nashville, where I've met many other fabulous aspiring writers and wonderfully encouraging agents and editors, some even expressed interest.
Alas, I remain unsigned, so like many writer's before me, I've decided to go the Indie route. I hope that you will come along with me as I make the journey from aspiring to published author.