I Landed a Publisher Without Even Trying

This is not advice. This is simply what happened. It’s a story about obsession. And it’s a story that ends with me landing a publisher.

Let’s roll the clock back to 2018. I’m newly married. My spouse and I rent a house with a bat problem on the Iowa side of the Big Sioux River. One of the upper-story rooms is where I’ve tucked my desk, which has a chair’s length of visible carpet between it and the spare bed. It’s the first week of January and cold, and I’m working on a novel that won’t have a completed first draft until 2019. Or at least I’m supposed to be working on that novel. Instead, I’m on my computer, looking at old story files. Two of them jump out at me: Expire and The Defining Attribute of a Girl. The first one is a back-and-forth between two people. The second piece is a monologue. I decided that it would be more interesting to turn that second story into a two-person dialogue, like Expire.

I rewrote it. Loved it. Retitled the thing The Defining Attribute of a Woman since I was no longer the young 20-year-old who wrote the first draft. And I decided that I wanted to do this every week for a year. I ended up writing 53 pieces of pure dialogical fiction, some of which even got published by various platforms, including a couple using Medium. Most of these dialogues comprise the book which will be put out soon by the publisher I wasn’t…