My Luck Lives in New Orleans: The Long Strange Trip of My Publishing Journey

In Disney movies, the fairy godmother is usually a person, but I think my experience would suggest that my fairy godmother is actually a place. A beautiful place bursting with mojo, where joy and art exist right alongside deep sorrow and the gritty reality of life in the modern era…it is, actually, a blend that pretty fairly represents my author brand as well.

I’ve always thought it was funny how, the longer my writing career goes on, the more times it circles back to this fascinating city. I’ve told my critique partner a hundred times that if I could ever wring a happy ending out of it, it would make a hell of a story. And now that my wildest dream has come true, I thought it was finally time to share the whole serendipitous tale.

When the call came for me from an editor in New York City, offering a multi-book deal, I thought I had finally made it. The year was 2013.

I’d first started trying to get a literary agent in 2005, and written two more books since, but at that moment, I’d mostly been writing fanfiction. My fanfiction stories had been turned into actual books by Amazon’s brand-new Kindle Worlds program and they were burning up the KW bestseller charts.

In a move that usually only happens in, well, fanfiction, my fic had caught the eye of an NYC editor. She decided I was the author they needed to write a new series based in New Orleans.

Cue the champagne!

But the bubbles began to pop, one by one, when I got further into the fine print. It wasn’t a traditional book deal: it was work for hire. That means they would tell me what the book was about, and I would write it. The book they wanted…it wasn’t me. It wasn’t how I wanted to represent myself as an author. But it was a real publishing house! This was how I could meet the movers and shakers and get my name out there.

Turning down that deal was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. Hollywood and internet memes clearly teach that taking risks pays off. The thing they don’t show on the motivational posters is all those times when they don’t pay off: when you don’t land the mountain bike jump and you break your back. Or if you put out a book with your name on the cover but every time someone mentions it, you feel the need to apologize, because it’s not work you can be proud of.

If I’d known, dear reader, how long it would take to get my writing career off the ground after that, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to turn down that opportunity, with the faith that another would come along. One that would let me do work I believed in.

From that experience, I wrote a book called A Cruel Kind of Beautiful, which was published this last December. Part of it is about an indie rock drummer who gets a chance at a huge break in her career. But of course, the big break comes with a whole lot of caveats, and you get to see her struggle to decide what risks will carry her closer to the person she wants to be, and which will sweep her further away.

That book was the third I queried in my search for an agent, and I got The Call when I was eating barbecue in New Orleans, in 2015.

I’d wanted to visit New Orleans ever since the research I’d done on it for that first, defunct book contract, but this was my very first visit. My husband and I were in the midst of an 8000-mile road trip and our stop in New Orleans lasted a mere three days. When we pulled into town, the old-school streetlamps were wreathed in fog, the streets mysteriously shadowed under the arching branches of live oak trees. It made me understand why people had believed for centuries that vampires were real. Stories seethed under the thin surface of that city, calling to me from every interesting passerby and half-renovated building I saw.

The call I got on that trip was from Naomi Davis, a literary agent who had read A Cruel Kind of Beautiful and wanted to represent my work. I only knew a few things about her, but I liked her honesty and I had a good feeling. I took that leap, and only came to realize in the years after what a divinely perfect match we were. I couldn’t, as it eventually turned out, have chosen a better agent if I’d had my choice of every one in the universe.

I left New Orleans in 2015 with a brand-new agent, a perma-grin on my face, and a deep need to write a book set in that magical city.

In 2016, my husband and I returned to live there for two months, walking miles and miles through the streets of the city to start to know all the little corners of it. During that trip, I wrote a book called Unbreak Me. It was set half in Montana and half in New Orleans. It wasn’t quite western and wasn’t quite urban. It was a romance, but read like women’s fiction with a literary-scale metaphor comparing a woman’s recovery from trauma to the rebuilding of the city after the storm. The heroine falls in love with a horse trainer from New Orleans, who has his own trauma from surviving Hurricane Katrina.

The story came out surprisingly sweet as they helped each other begin to heal, but I worried it was too controversial to ever sell, and I berated myself constantly for bothering with something that would just waste my agent’s time. When I was halfway through the first draft, I swore I would put it aside and write something easy and marketable for a change.

And then I wrote 50,000 words in seven days. The second half of that book didn’t just write itself. It made me write it, in a hundred-year-old house on the banks of the flood-swollen Mississippi River.

My agent loved it, and sent out the first emails to publishers in October 2016, one month before Donald Trump got elected. The book went out on submission just as our country exploded. Everything that had been simmering beneath the surface was now in our faces. We saw the rise of #MeToo and #TimesUp. Everything that played a part in my book was suddenly written all over the newspaper headlines. And we saw how very much work there was left to do.

I called senators and marched in protest and signed petitions and ground my teeth at my ever-silent inbox. Since signing with my agent, I’d subbed three books to publishers. My career was at a standstill, and no matter how hard I worked to improve my craft, nothing was budging.

So I went back to New Orleans.

This time, my husband and I stayed for a month. We rented a little purple shotgun house in Midtown, with a bakery on one corner and award-winning barbecue on the other. I sat under oak trees older than the USA and wrote a book about teenagers watching their world fall apart until they decided the word “politics” sounded a lot less boring and a lot more like something that was bringing their lives crashing down. I wrote about what it took to force people to stand up and fight. I stopped checking my email.

It was spring of 2018. Five years since I turned down the contract that was so wrong for my career, sure I could make it on my own without compromising my values. Three years that I’d had various books on sub to publishers. Two since I’d written my little book set in New Orleans. Eighteen months since it went out on sub and god bless my agent, she still hadn’t given up on it.

When my phone rang in New Orleans, it was an editor who wanted to buy my book set in New Orleans. She had read the manuscript, actually, on a trip to the very same city, when the atmosphere on and off the page was all around her. She also just so happened to be from the exact publishing house I’d dreamed about since I was a little girl. On that phone call, I clamped my teeth shut over my fangirl squeals and attempted to maintain my chill. I could hardly believe that good news was even a possibility after all those months. But the time hadn’t been right for that story, and now it was.

In July 2018, I signed my contract with Berkley Books of Penguin Random House, my dream publisher, right alongside the name of my dream agent at my dream literary agency. For a series set in New Orleans, on a book that I was proud to put my name on, with a contract written to my terms.

That first contract in 2013 was wrong for me, but now I’m so thankful it happened exactly as it did. Because it made me realize I didn’t give a damn about professional success if I couldn’t also have creative integrity. It inspired me to write the book that found my agent. It introduced me to the city that inspired the book that got not just a book deal, but The Book Deal. At the time, it felt like a failure, but it was the start of everything.

So you see, dreams do come true. They just sometimes take longer than you expect, and lead you down a more interesting path to the finish line than you ever could have imagined for yourself.

And just in case, it never hurts to buy a ticket to New Orleans.