A Night at the Edgars

So…I’ve been waiting for what seems like ages till I was allowed to talk about this, and now I can.

Back in December I sent my little haunted house mystery novel to the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel contest, in which one book was selected out of something like 400 people submitted manuscripts to win a Minotaur publishing contract and $10,000 advance. 

And it won.

I still can’t quite wrap my head around it, and I still wait for the email or phone call saying “oops, we made a mistake, wrong number!” Or worse, the email that reads, “yes, we liked your book, but then we met you in person and you’re too strange and off-putting, so we have changed our minds, sorry about that.” Or…or…or… I think it’s a curse of the fertile imagination that one can always come up with thousands of reasons we should just stop doing whatever we do, because we are terrible. (In fact, didn’t I write a blog post about exactly this phenomenon? Yes, yes I did. Shut up, Norbert.)

Part of winning the competition meant that Minotaur flew me out to the Edgar awards banquet in New York, a wonderful gathering of crime-writing luminaries—and by “luminaries,” I mean hard-working writers, who plot and write and rewrite and edit and edit again, who do the work year in and year out and create these amazing stories. My current soon-to-be-reading list includes pretty much all the nominated books, and not only the winners; you don’t get to the Edgars unless you know your craft, and every single author on that list is an Edgar-nominated writer forever. (Top of the list for now: Lina Chern’s Play the Fool, I. S. Berry’s The Peacock and the Sparrow, Danielle Arceneaux’s Glory Be, and frankly anything by Linda Castillo, who took home two Edgars that night and whose Kate Burkholder Amish mystery series looks right up my alley.)

It was a magical whirlwind of a night—I met my agent Alice Speilburg in person for the first time, I got to meet and talk with a bunch of the amazing folks from the Minotaur team, and I got to applaud the authors who won their categories. The room was lovely. The dessert had a little piece of white chocolate with Poe’s face on it. The envelopes were hard to open. It was like “Oscar Night for Writernerds,” and I mean that in the best possible way. 

So: this blog, which started as a “me geeking out about story structure” page, will now most likely morph into a “how a new writer becomes a published author” chronicling of the journey.

Unless they call me up today and tell me, no, it was supposed to be someone else, and I’m just too strange to publish.

It could still happen.

(Shut up, Norbert.)