It’s always a special treat for me to host debut novelists like my shewrites.com pal Yejide Kilanko, whose evocatively-titled Daughters Who Walk This Path is just out from Penguin Canada. Yejide was born in Ibadan, Nigeria and majored in Political Science at the University of Ibadan before marrying and moving to Laurel, Maryland (not far from my old Greenspring Valley stomping grounds and those of my Gaithersburg Book Fest friends). She attended the University of Victoria, and is now a Child Protection Worker living in Chatham, Ontario. And a published novelist! Do enjoy her story of how she got there, and take a look at this debut novel that Chika Unigwe calls “a subtle yet complex exploration of what it means to be a young woman growing up in contemporary Nigeria … a delightful, haunting book from a very talented writer.” – Meg

The things that can happen when we go down different paths.

My debut novel, Daughters Who Walk This Path, really began life as a short poem I wrote in June 2009. That poem was titled Silence Speaks. At the time, my day job was as a newly minted Social Worker in child protection services. The role guaranteed a constant exposure to heart-wrenching stories of child sexual abuse and I struggled to fall and stay asleep. Working on the novel every night, sometimes through the night, became my outlet. This is why I have often said that in the beginning, I really wrote the novel for me.

The truth was that prior to this time, writing a novel had not been on my list of things to do. I did love words since I became an avid reader at a young age and started writing mostly autobiographical poems when I was twelve. But as far as I was concerned, life had other plans for me.

Over the course of eight months, the novel grew from scribbles of random thoughts to a manuscript I shared with a few close friends. Their encouraging words spurred me on to work on it some more and a year later, I had a complete manuscript. I also had no idea about what to do with it.

By then, I had read on many writing sites that most, if not all writers, had those first, starter manuscripts tucked away somewhere, never to see the light of day. I decided that I too would put my starter novel away. At least, I had proved to myself that I could write a novel. Who was I, to think that my story was good enough to be published?

However, an inspiring conversation with an old friend during a July 2010 visit to Nigeria made me rethink my position about seeking publication. I thought to myself that there had to be a reason why I had gone down this writing path. I had to give myself a chance. I could not quit without even starting.

On August 16, 2010, with an equal mixture of dread and anticipation, I sent out queries to literary agents in the United States. That same day, I received a request for a full manuscript. Exactly one week later, I had an offer of representation from one of the agents I had queried. I was ecstatic and thus began the second part of this incredible journey.

In May 2011, Daughters Who Walk This Path was bought by Penguin Canada. The novel was published on April 10, 2012. Following the exciting news that the novel was Costco Canada’s buyer Catherine Bergeron’s pick for the month, on May 5, 2012, the novel debuted on the Globe and Mail Bestseller’s list.

As I write this, my head is still spinning from all the things that have happened in such a short time. One thought that often comes to my mind when I think of this unlikely journey, is what would have happened if I had kept that first manuscript tucked away in the bottom of my drawer.

I guess, we’ll never know. – Yejide

Before writing her debut novel, Prosper in Love, Deborah Michel spent years in the magazine world, as a New York nightlife columnist for Avenue magazine and, later, writing for Spy, Premiere, House Beautiful, Buzz, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine about everything from the movie industry to interior design to which private jet Silicon Valley tech moguls favored. Another favorite author of mine, Claire Cook, calls the novel “smart, deliciously witty, and thoroughly engrossing … a richly detailed comedy of modern manners and the ways in which we complicate our own lives.” And Deborah’s story of how it came to be published will be heartening for anyone who is finding it takes more time than one might imagine to get a book out in the world. – Meg 

I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I got my first real job I already knew the most important thing about being a novelist. My dream back then was to write for magazines, and I started pitching story ideas to an editor whose name I got off the masthead of a magazine I saw in a doctor’s office. (Okay, so I didn’t have the prestigious career path thing totally figured out.) I had one idea in particular that I thought was just perfect for the magazine. The editor was polite and asked me to put my pitch in writing. When I hadn’t heard back two weeks later I gave him another call. He apologized: he hadn’t quite gotten around to it, he’d let me know in a week or two. Two weeks later, not having heard from him, I checked in. He’d been busy, asked for another couple of weeks, didn’t call. Again, I called back, and was put off—nicely. So it went, until a few months later he finally called me. “Was I happy where I was currently working,” he wanted to know. I was a secretary, sitting right outside the glass wall of her boss’s office, making a hash of invoices and contracts. “Um, why?” I asked, feeling my boss’s eye on me. I’d already been reprimanded for too many personal calls. The editor invited me to come in to interview for a position.

Later he told me he’d figured anyone that persistent would make a good journalist. The funny thing was, I hadn’t seen myself as that terrier-with-a-bone type. I was just following up. I believed I had a good story and that therefore the magazine must want to print it.

It wasn’t long before I tried to write a novel, but it was very long before I actually sold one. Embarrassingly long—it took more than two decades. When I finally told friends that I had a book deal, they invariably said, “You must be so thrilled.” Relieved was the truer, more accurate word. Finally! By the time Prosper in Love was making the rounds of agents (and please note the plural “rounds”—I tried with draft after draft) I knew a lot about publishing. I’d worked in magazines for years, had lots of friends who worked in book publishing, had several who’d published books. I’d even, in despair and loneliness, been through an MFA program. I had a card file box filled with agents’ names, contact info, and detailed notes on which writers they represented. I’d been at it for so long, with various attempts at different novels, that many of those agents had two or three agencies listed and crossed out, a record of their own career paths.

I took to heart the very nice notes from agents all along the way, telling me all the good things about my writing and that I was really very close. Plus, I had that magazine career to bolster my confidence: people had paid me for my writing. But while grimly proud of my perseverance, I was haunted by one very specific nightmare: that I was one of those sad cases, a writer who had no idea that she wasn’t good enough. Within one month, two separate writing friends told me they were afraid I might be the one in my generation who deserved to be published but for one reason or another never was.

It’s such a cliché: It only takes one. But that’s what happened: one  (delightful! brilliant!) agent liked my book. In short shrift, three also delightful and clearly brilliant editors wanted to bid on it.

Fine, so it didn’t just “happen.” I had forced myself to sit down and take a hard look at what was in my manuscript after all those years, and had really tried to think about what wasn’t: what was in my head but which I hadn’t managed to get on the page. I wrote another draft. When I reread it, I felt, really for the first time, that I’d done my best, that it was all there, and that if this one didn’t sell, I’d put it away, satisfied with myself at least, and move on to the next one, which I’d actually already started between drafts.

As I struggle to finish that novel, what I try to remember when I sit down to write is not the hard-won knowledge about writing that comes from years of doing it, nor is it the joy and confidence that came from finally selling a book. Sometimes, knowing too much about the business can work against you. No, I take a deep breath and try to recapture that crazy, foolish, ignorant innocence that I had all those years ago, that belief that if I came up with something, people would want to read it—and that I shouldn’t give up until they could. – Deborah

Of the many wonderful moments in National Poetry month, my favorite is “Poem in Your Pocket Day” – which is today. The idea is simple: Put a copy of a poem you love in your pocket, and share it with friends. I carry a copy of the poem included in The Four Ms. Bradwells – Jane Kenyon’s amazing “Let Evening Come” – in my journal for inspiration every day of every year. But today I’m moving it to my pocket.

What poem are you carrying with you? – Meg

Lynda Rutledge’s path to publishing Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale - which comes out tomorrow! – included stints petting baby rhinos and dodging hurricanes as a freelance journalist, as well as a serious “break up” with fiction. Shoeless Joe author W.P. Kinsella calls the debut ”eerie, charming, heart rending and heart breaking at the same time … a triumph.” If it’s half as funny as her story of getting it into print – and with its title, how can it fail to be? – it’s destined to be a huge success. – Meg

A decade ago I broke up with fiction. I had given it my heart and soul, and what had it done for me? Broke my heart, I tell you, and darkened my soul. Thus began my Blue Period. At the time, I was a freelance journalist, involved in a fruitful if purely professional relationship with nonfiction, but I couldn’t quite shake those pesky literary dreams. So by the time of the break-up, I had been herding words into “promising” failed novels so long I’d forgotten, no doubt on purpose, some of my earlier fiction attempts. I bumped into a former writing workshop classmate that year, and the first thing she asked was: “How’s April?

“April who?” I said.

“You know, your character in your novel.”

Omigod, I thought. I’ve blocked out April and her entire world. That can’t be good.

About that same time, I heard National Book Award winner Charles Johnson admit he’d written six novels before he sold one, so I began counting up mine. There was the failed coming-of-age novel, the failed mystery, and the failed April idea…whatever that was. There was the arts council award and the writing residencies that kept fiction sweet-talking in my ear, which inspired the failed roman a clef that needed me to be dead before seeing print. And then came the comic novel set at a garage sale. When it was taken by an agent on the condition I’d do a rewrite, I thought fiction had finally proposed. I can still hear the plop that manuscript made as the postman pitched it back on my front porch when the agent changed her mind.

So I’d had it—I showed fiction the door. Then I went out and saw the world on the strength of my nonfiction pen taking every crazy extroverted assignment I was offered, dodging hurricanes, swimming with endangered sea creatures, petting baby rhinos, even hangliding velcroed to a guy off a Swiss mountain. I was taking the breakup hard. I was going to have fun even if it killed me.

And here is where the proverbial worm turns: While I was having all that frantic death-defying nonfiction fun, I caught fiction sneaking in the upstairs window. My mind was being unfaithful, still playing around with the last spurned idea– the garage sale. Forget the thing! I told myself; it’s not good for you! Any well-adjusted person accepts the concept of a failed idea! But as time went on, I began to grasp the possibility that it wasn’t the concept that had failed, but my immature treatment of it.

So over that entire decade, as I went about my nonfiction business, I let the idea simmer and grow and deepen as I did the same thing as a writer. Humor became a tool of the truth, not an end in itself. Profound themes worth the effort began to form. And I slowly realized there was a reason the idea would not let me go. It was trying to tell me something I missed during the first fling. Because what are stories but ways to explain the world to ourselves? And if lucky, others? And in so doing, I understood that this was what I wanted from the relationship all along, not just a good time, but a commitment that offered me food for my soul as well as my heart. The moment was right: I reinvented the idea and the newer, better garage sale is now, as of this very moment, open for business–Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale, to be exact.

So what is the moral of my little tale? Never give up? No, something deeper, I hope: Give up when you need to, but keep listening for the idea that won’t let you go. It just may be trying to tell you something wonderful when the time is finally right. - Lynda

I first connected with Andi Buchanan on Readerville.com years ago, when we were both baby authors (her first, Mothershock, came out five months before my The Language of Light), and it’s been a great pleasure to watch her success with books like the New York Times bestseller, The Daring Book for Girls. We’ve remained connected on SheWrites.com, and now Andi is doing something doubly daring: her latest book, the young adult novel Gift, is being released first as a multimedia e-book experience (think videos, games, music), with a print edition coming in July. Andi also founded the fabulous Literary Mama website, and is a classical pianist. Add Gift to a longer and longer line of successes for this talented writer. – Meg

Sometimes, after the lights are out, long after we’ve finished reading for the night, my son will say, “Can you tell me a story?” I’ll stall a bit while I think of a story to tell, and then once I’ve landed on an idea, usually, right as I start, he’ll say, “No, not a story about that.” So I’ll try again: “No, something different!” And again: “Eh, I don’t like that one.” Eventually I’ll settle on a beginning he likes, and we’ll both sit there in the dark, trying to figure it out together.

Writing is a little bit like that. There’s a lot of sitting in the dark, metaphorically and otherwise, trying to come up with something that makes sense for the story you’re telling and also still captivates your inner night-time critic. And often the story you end up creating isn’t the one you set out tell in the first place.

I started working on my novel — my first, serious novel — almost ten years ago. The story came to me in glimpses, and that was good, because with two very young children, glimpses were all I could manage in the scant time I had to myself. I wrote down what I could, smoothed out the little I had of it, labored over the voice, the question of what to do about plot. All the while, other things took precedence: my kids, freelance work, book proposals, the nonfiction books I was contracted to write. But still, this story lingered, and I always felt some day I’d return to it.

After a lucky break landed one of my books on the bestseller list, I finally had the time and means to do that. I settled down with my laptop and tried to reacquaint myself with that beginning of a novel, and with all the other odds and ends of writing-in-progress that had been put on hold while I’d worked on that bestselling project. I re-read what I’d written of the story, let myself try to sink back into the world of it, even managed to make sense of most of the hasty notes and sketchy outlines I’d dashed off back when I understood the shorthand of the story I was trying to tell.

But, like a little boy in the dark, requesting a different bedtime story, I wasn’t sure I still wanted to tell it.

I was stuck, a little bit. Something just didn’t feel right. Even though I finally had the time, the mental space, the freedom to really explore this story and write the novel I’d been wanting to write for years, I couldn’t seem to find my way back in.

So I did what I do when my bedtime story gets vetoed by my little night-time critic: I tried something different. I’d had another idea I’d kicked around in notebooks and text files for years about a group of friends who might or might not be haunted by a ghost. That seemed fun, I thought; perhaps I’ll work on that for a while, just as a distraction, and then, somehow, I’ll find my way back to the novel.

It was somewhere around twenty or thirty thousand words in that I realized: Oh. This is my novel.

The story I’d been telling myself for fun, to pass the time until I figured out how to write my serious thing, had turned out to be my serious thing, the thing I was going to do next. Gradually, over the course of the next six months or so, the twenty thousand words turned into eighty thousand words, and the friends who might be haunted became friends who were definitely haunted, and the little ghost story I’d had in my head as a “someday” story became the story I, in fact, was telling right now.

The other story, that novel I started so long ago, still waits for me on my hard-drive, and in back-up files, and in auto-corrected notes stored on my phone, and in marked-up, printed-out pages in a folder on my bookshelf. I have a feeling I’ll get back to it eventually. But for now I’m happy to celebrate the release of the story that snuck up on me, the one I hadn’t planned on telling, the surprise.

It’s called “Gift.” – Andi

I’m in Paris for a month, writing and walking in the steps of some literary greats. Yesterday, Mac and I visited Shakespeare and Company, where the likes of Anais Nin, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, and Ernest Hemingway have stood.

I’m also immersed in the English Lake District, where the novel I’m working on, “The Wednesday Daughters,” is set. Since the Lakes are the home of William Wordsworth, I thought I’d share a quote from him to celebrate National Poetry Month this week. It’s about poetry, but is more broadly true of all literature:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

If you have a favorite Wordsworth poem or line, do share it in the comments. Or if you’ve been to Shakespeare and Company, do share when, and whether you left a note on their “love wall”! – Meg