I'm excited to announce that after more than fifteen years of dedicated writing, workshops, critique groups, and conferences, of getting the input of a freelance editor, and of doing countless manuscript swaps with writer friends, I have an agent representing my novel, ROOM 100, and we are currently working on revisions.It's worth mentioning: Finding a literary agent has been more of a journey than a destination. I've been submitting manuscripts to agents since my teens. One of the few times in my adult life that I've lost my temper was as a sophomore in college, at a cheap printer whose ink I couldn't afford to replace, because it made my query letters look like coded messages from Rainbow Brite. Throughout my early twenties I kept rejection slips on a nail on a wall beside my desk, because a young Stephen King had done it, too. (I'm not sure I learned anything from this, though, other than that colorful rejection slips look pretty when you collect enough of them.) When submissions went electronic, it took a long time to learn the art of timing--i.e., don't open a message from an agent first thing in the morning, or in the middle of a phone conversation, or right before Thanksgiving dinner.My agent rejected me three times before accepting a revision of my second novel. By then, my mantra was rejection isn't a reason to give up; it's just a benchmark. I'd found that it was much easier to accept that my writing needed work, but more difficult to figure out what to change. ("But I've already taken ten workshops and gone to three conferences!") In retrospect, hiring a good freelance editor was the best thing I did for my craft, besides sitting down at the computer every weekday morning for fifteen years to read, write, revise, and repeat.Being on both sides of a manuscript has improved the freelance editing I do for my clients (because everything, from writing to editing to friendship to love to triathlon training, is a work in progress). In the coming months and years, I hope to bring even more lessons from the process of working with an agent and other industry pros back to my editing business, and continue providing writers on this same journey with useful feedback and support. Onward!