Just finished my manuscript for Get Over It, Amy Packer

🖋I just finished the manuscript for my new novel, Get Over It, Amy Packer. 🖋It’s my first YA novel (or middle grade, I’m not sure where it falls yet). 🖋I sent it off, along with the pitch sheet, to my agent for feedback. 🖋Even more impressive…I figured out how to send the manuscript to my kindle using my “kindle” email. 🖋I’m excited to get a break from reading and rereading the manuscript on my computer screen. 🖋

🖋The story behind this book is an interesting one. 🖋Last spring, I started writing short stories after hearing Sandra Cisneros speak at Hockaday in February 2019. 🖋I wrote one story, then another and another.🖋And soon I had a small collection (about 35K words) of vignettes inspired by growing up on Long Island in the 1990s. I called it One Square Mile.

🖋I’ve had a few of these stories published in literary magazines and journals since then. 🖋But when I sent the collection as a whole to my agent, she had misgivings about its marketability. 🖋It’s hard to sell short story collections and it’s equally hard to sell them as a debut to one of the Big 5 publishers. 🖋

🖋So we went back to the drawing board. 🖋My agent loved the character Amy Packer from the short stories. She’s an antagonist in two of the vignettes, I think. 🖋My agent thought of a great title—Get Over It, Amy Packer—and suggested I take the universe of the short story collection and write a YA novel under the assumption that even when YA novels are marketed to young readers, adults end up reading them too. 🖋

🖋I tried revising the stories to fit into the new idea, but it didn’t work. 🖋I decided that I liked One Square Mike as it was. 🖋I would pursue smaller presses for publication and keep sending the stories out to bigger journals and magazines in the hopes that something will hit. 🖋

🖋But I loved the title Get Over It, Amy Packer, too. 🖋And with a good idea comes the compulsion to put the story to paper. 🖋Then COVID-19 rocked the whole world and suddenly, I had more time than ever to draft, read, and revise. 🖋I’ve been writing for hours each day pretty consistently since March. 🖋

🖋So, step one of the novel writing process is done. 🖋Now I wait and see what my agent and her interns think. 🖋Fingers crossed they love the story.

Now for some rest and relaxation. I think I’ll go back to reading Curtis Sittenfield’s novel PREP.