You know when someone asks you a question, and the only
answer you can think of is, “It’s a long story….”? Well, this is one of those
long stories. When people ask me how I got a book contract, I’m never sure if
they really want to sit down and hear everything. So I’ll say it here instead,
where hopefully only people who are interested have to suffer through it.
Things don’t always (or, actually, often) work this way. My
story is not typical. Then again, if there’s anything I’ve learned over the
past few years, it’s that no one’s story is typical. But you can still learn from
other people’s experiences, even if your own experiences won’t look the same.
Around Thanksgiving during my senior year of high school, my
twin sister Erika, a future elementary education major, was reading a lot of
kids’ fantasy series. She didn’t like a lot of them because they were
predictable and used random bursts of magic to solve whatever problem happened
to come up. “You got poisoned by a snakebite? Don’t worry, we happen to have a
venom-reducing emerald on hand.” (No, that really happened. Honest.)
So she did the only reasonable thing to do when your sister
is a writer. She said, “Hey, Amy, I know what I want for my birthday. A book.”
And I said, “Well, it’s six months early, but okay. What
book?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t written it yet.”
Silence. “Um…what do you mean by that?”
