I’ve always been a storyteller, ever since I was itty-bitty. It never occurred to me, though, until I was in my late twenties that people actually wrote those books I devoured by the dozen. Not exalted literati who lived in New York and London and Paris, but housewives, mothers, secretaries, teachers. Real people. Like me.
I’d always written scenes — just the highlights, thank you very much. I wasn’t interested in what I considered the boring connective tissue that tied those scenes together. But once I thought I might actually be able to write a book, I realized I had to have a complete book, not just the highlights.
So I finished my first entire manuscript, typed that baby up (yep, this was in the pre-home computer days) and shipped it off to an editor at Silhouette. Mailing that manuscript was absolutely one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I dropped it in the box at a different post office than the one we normally used, because I knew if I went to the regular post office, if I changed my mind, I could run inside and Mr. Shue, our regular clerk, would get it back for me.
Dreaming of publication and fame and fortune, I went back to work on the next manuscript. I was about halfway through it when a package arrived on my doorstep. From New York. Addressed to me in my own handwriting. I ripped it open — like ripping open my own chest — and pulled out my precious hand-typed manuscript, along with a letter from the editor. She liked my idea and my characters . . . at least until the hero did this, this and this, and the heroine responded with that, that and that. The last paragraph boiled down to something along the lines of, “Good luck, but don’t submit to me again.”
I was a much more tender soul back then than I am now. I cried. I locked myself in the bedroom and boohooed like a baby. Only the third person in the entire world to read my work had just told me it sucked, and I was devastated. I was never going to write another word again.
For two days, I was weepy but determined that my hobby of writing was DONE. Then I got up on the third morning and thought, “When the hero and heroine did this, that and this? What the he** was she talking about? None of that stuff happened in my book!”
I got over being devastated pretty quickly. Who was this woman who’d sent me a harsh rejection on a book I hadn’t even written? How did I know she’d even read any of the one I did write? And why in the world would I take her opinion of me over my own?
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was my “Ah-hah!” moment. I’d been smacked upside the head with a challenge, and no way was I going to lose. I would show that editor that I did, too, have talent. I finished the book I was working on, submitted it to Leslie Wainger at Silhouette Intimate Moments, and had an offer within a matter of days. The book was part of a special promotion, showcasing the brightest of Intimate Moments’ new authors for that year, and the rest, as they say, is history. It’s been almost twenty-one years since Leslie bought that first book and I’ve sold more than sixty since. I’ve had a movie made, I’ve won every major award in our industry (some of them numerous times), and I’ve made bestseller lists.
That editor later quit the editing business with the plan, she said, of writing romance novels herself. All these years later, I’m still writing and selling and winning awards. As for her? I heard she gathered a few rejections, then gave up. Even with all that I’ve accomplished, I admit to taking some perverse pleasure in that.
Finding out that I couldn’t resist a challenge wasn’t the last of my “Ah-hah!” moments, but it’s what led to the rest and got me to where I am today.
Susan Shay
