I'm looking at another month of revisions on my book. Honestly, this book couldn't have taken any less than four years to finish - I personally had to go through things, learn things, evolve as the book evolves, get new ideas every day.

It IS frustrating; I'd have liked to get it out last fall, but books just don't work that way. They grow at a predestined rate that you can't really change by putting more hours in, I believe. At least, in my case, I am still growing up and learning things, both about life and about writing.

I sometimes remind myself of my experience with my first published novel. I started writing Carrie Pilby when I was 27. I was going through a lot of changes in perspective and outlook at the time, and that's probably what fueled it. I couldn't write that book today - at least, not in the same way. Maybe it'd be better now, or maybe it wouldn't have gotten written at all.

I started writing it in May of 1999. I finished a draft in December of 1999. I sent the first 50 pages out over several months and got some feedback and an offer or two to pass it on to a different agent. As I got more feedback, I changed and revised it. I took periods of months off when I wasn't hearing anything back. Then I would look at it anew.

Over the summer of 2000, I read more, learned more about how to present the character, and did some revisions. It was passed on to a wonderful new agent in December of 2000. She finished reading it in late January of 2001, I think. We met for lunch and she gave me some suggestions. I handed in a new draft and she had one or two more suggestions - like, add in a Thanksgiving scene, since I kept mentioning Thanksgiving but never showed what happened.

I finished the new draft and mailed it to her. She sent it out to a few editors. An editorial assistant who got it loved it and had lunch with me. She had more suggestions. Like, add another scene with Carrie and Kara. Which I did.

That summer, she made the case for it to her superiors. She talked it up. At the end of the summer, August 2001, they rejected it.

I read in Newsweek about a new imprint that was focusing on books about women in their twenties trying to figure life out, kind of like Bridget Jones or the Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing. I didn't know if my agent wanted to go that route, but it was an idea. She mentioned it in an e-mail to me, too.

9/11 happened and I didn't care much about books for a while. We might not even be there tomorrow.

After life started returning to normal, my agent talked to me. She wanted to send the book to Red Dress Ink, but she'd wait a month or two because it was still too close to 9/11 to worry about such things.

We gave it to them in the winter. An editor really, really liked it. But in the end, it was too odd for what they were specifically doing.

I started writing another book, Starting from Square Two, which seemed more chick-littish and also focused on a notion I really wanted to explore - what if a woman who had always had things come easy, and had never really had to date much, suddenly lost her husband? I started writing it in late December of 2001 and flew through it - I was so interested to see what would happen to my character.

We submitted a few chapters to the editor at RDI around February of 2002, I think. She had lunch with my agent and said that she was also interested in Carrie Pilby again, since they were getting books with similar plots to what they were already doing, and mine was slightly different.

And so that spring (about four years after I'd started writing it), I got a book deal, something I'd wanted for many many years but had no guarantee would ever happen.

I have to remind myself that CP wasn't instantly accepted, and ended up going through many revisions based on the advice of different people before it got to the point of being accepted.

A book certainly doesn't have to be perfect when it goes out to publishers or editors - they might like the idea and buy it and then give suggestions. But it's still good to remember that it doesn't always come out perfect the first time.