Well, Howdy!

Hello, there!

How lucky I feel to have to been asked to join forces with these esteemed writers! The last few weeks have seemed like a happy dream, and this just adds to the happiness.

Quick bio: I live in Oakland with my wife, Lala, who plays the banjo. We have three dogs, four cats, many spinning wheels, and even more instruments. I got my MFA at Mills College, and of course, like everyone else, I've wanted to Be A Writer since I was six or seven years old. I've written Yarnagogo since the dark ages, when there were only 30 or 40 knitbloggers out there. Remember that? I love the knitting world, everything about it.

The fact that the dream is coming true is kind of extraordinarily hard to comprehend. It kind of feels like the top of my head has just blown right off. You know?

THE CALL:
From my blog post

I started the coffee. I blearily rubbed my eyes. I sat at the computer to work.

Now, my normal M.O. is to sit and write for about an hour or so before I allow myself to check email or anything online. I don’t turn my airport connection off, though, because I like to write with Pandora playing in the background, so I need to be online. So I don’t check email, but my email notifier still comes through, because I’m too lazy to disable it.

I opened the document I had last been working on. I stared at it. My eyes might have crossed in sleepiness, I’m not sure.

My computer bing-ed and I saw a message come in. My gmail notifier lets me see who sent it and displays the first sentence.

The email was from Susanna. It said, “Call me as soon as you wake up.”

Yeah. Yeah!

My heart started to race. Literally. As I dialed her number, my hands were shaking. With delight in her voice, she told me that Avon (a division of HarperCollins) wanted my book! Wanted to BUY it!

Not only that, but they wanted a THREE-BOOK DEAL.

I looked up, out the window, while she was talking. Was I still dreaming? The dream I’d had right before waking up had been so good, so vivid. Was this just an extension of the dream? Was I still in bed? I remember seeing the pigeons that I hate perched up on the eave outside my window. I didn’t think I’d see the pigeons if it was just a good dream. I loved those pigeons at that moment. I think I asked Susanna that, who assured me, no, I wasn’t dreaming.

So now, I'm working on Nanowrimo. Hopefully I'm writing the second book in the series (Eliza's Cottage was originally a Nano from 2006), but the point of Nanowrimo is to write hard and fast, and get a novel done in a month. I'm aiming for 75,000 words, and I'm okay with all the words being total crap -- I'll sort it out later. December is reserved for a final pass-through on Eliza's Cottage, whose due date is January.

Tonight I have a reading at KnitOneOne in Berkeley, and I'm SO nervous about it. Wish me luck.

It's the dream. But I'm really writing. Really writing. And loving every minute of it. Thanks for letting me say hello, and I look forward to being here!

Welcome, Rachael Herron!

Did you notice there's a new name on our roster? Rachael Herron (many of you probably know Rachael from her fabulous blog Yarn-A-Go-Go) has joined our merry band of knitting writers and I'm delighted. I've been reading Rachael for awhile now and have celebrated her happy times in lurkdom but when I read that she received The Call--well, I couldn't lurk any longer.

The Call is what a writer waits for. The Call doesn't just rock your world; it changes it forever. The Call means somebody you're not related to read your work and liked it enough to pay you! To a writer, The Call means everything.

Here are the details from Publishers Marketplace:

Fiction: Women's/Romance Rachael Herron's debut ELIZA'S COTTAGE, in which a rancher's way of life is threatened by a woman trying to escape her past; the first book in the KNIT TWO TOGETHER series, to May Chen at Avon, in a good deal, at auction, in a three-book deal, for publication in Spring 2010, by Susanna Einstein at LJK Literary Management (NA).

You know how sometimes you find what you need when you need it most? After twenty-five years you can get a little cynical about the business of publishing. Sometimes it's hard to remember that pure, wonderful time when it was all shiny and bright and a reviewer had yet to say "I hope Ms. Bretton keeps her day job."

(Oops. Sorry. I don't know where that came from. And no, I'm not kidding. Flip through my Amazon reviews of ONCE AROUND and you'll find it. It's ten years old and I swear I have it memorized.) (Published Author Rule #1: You only remember the bad reviews. They might be outnumbered 100 to 1 by the good reviews but those stinkers will burn themselves into your brain permanently.)

Reading Rachael's reaction to The Call I remembered how excited I was when Vivian Stephens called me and said, "I want to buy your book." The fun of telling my husband and my parents and my friends. (We won't discuss the friend whose first words were, "Wow! If you can do it, anyone can.") I was two years past my bout with cancer and I was on top of the world! Why do we lose that feeling? I want to get it back.

Rachael will be here to introduce herself in the next few days (she can do a far better job of it than I can) and I know you're going to love her. (Yarn-A-Go-Go readers already do.)

RTYers, any other The Call stories to share?