I found out last Monday that there had been a solid offer made by Lyons Press for my manuscript. I'm still a bit shell shocked by the whole thing; after waiting so many years for the book to sell actually having that sale happen is a little scary. I wrote the first parts of MAP eight years ago, signed with my agent over three years ago and resigned myself to never having it sell at all last year. So while I am delighted with this deal, I am also stunned. This book and I have lived together for so very long; the very notion that someone else - that many other people - will be reading it is really quite overwhelming.

Other than my agent and brand new editor no one else has read this book, not completely, not as it is written now. So there are three of us who like it and trusting that you will all like it too is a terrifying prospect.

But I wouldn't be a writer if I didn't want to take that risk.

There are some things to note about all this - first, that I always, my entire life, dreamed of writing books. It is all I wanted to do and the long strange trip through college and teaching and bookselling and running ops for an Alaskan commuter and now, owning an aircraft leasing company with my husband (plus various other jobs along the way) was not the way I wanted to go to get here but circumstances (and my own lack of personal bravery) required the long way around. I wish when I was seventeen that I had been confident enough to pursue my dream then, but I wasn't. It has not been easy to pursue writing after class and after work and through countless conversations with people asking me why I keep writing when no one wants to read my work. There have been many times that I have thought it was past time to quit and my husband told me last week that he has been worried for months that the book wouldn't sell and I would be crushed. He knew how much I wanted this and how hard it has been to see him attain his dream (owning the business) while mine has seemed stalled despite my best efforts. Hanging in there has been tougher than I ever would have imagined decades ago.

This is why the most important advice I can give any writer is to have friends who write (or understand the publishing industry) that support you and also to have an agent. Without them - all of them - I would have given up, plain and simple. They buoyed me along, they told me I could write, they believed that it would all happen. They were distant enough from my book (and all my years of hoping) to see that I needed to just ride out the current travails in the industry and let the words speak for themselves. And my agent, Michele Rubin at Writers House, did all the work and never stopped doing the work, to get the book read (and read and read and read) by editors.

Michele never once faltered in her professional conviction that this book would sell and that has meant the world to me.

There are other things - lots of nuts and bolts writerly things including my work online - that helped make this sale happen and I will blog about them so others can see what I did & possibly learn from them. But mostly, at this moment, it is the support of my blogging/reading/reviewing friends that resonates the most. You have to have your tribe to stay sane and in every way that matters, this is my tribe:

Leila (Bookshelves of Doom), Gwenda (Shaken & Stirred), Jackie (Interactiver), Kelly (Writing & Ruminating), Erin (Miss Erin), Little Willow (Bildungsroman), Vivian (Hip Writer Mama), Pam (Mother Reader), Jules (Seven Imps), Betsy (Fuse Number 8), Liz (A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy), Trisha (The Ya Ya Yas), Kimberly (lectitans), Sarah & Tanita (Finding Wonderland), Jen Robinson (Jen Robinson's Book Page), Jennifer Laughran (Not Your Mother's Bookclub) and Kerry (Shelf Elf).

Thank you guys, from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for taking this journey with me and never leaving my side.