After writing four books, amassing stacks of rejection notices for them, and finally tucking each manuscript away to move on to the next book, what changed? What was it about this fifth book that turned all those rejection letters into a phone call from a terrific agent saying ‘I love your book. I’d like to sell it for you’? In short, I learned to make every scene in a story matter.

I’d started to wonder if maybe I’m just not that good at telling stories. It had been five books. Five. So the last manuscript got some amazing scores in a contest. So what? I’d queried my top two agent picks. One had already rejected the book on partial. Sure, the other agent had requested a full, but I was doomed, right? Easter Sunday rolls around. My mother calls. One of the cats escaped the house undetected and has been missing since Saturday night. Nicadeimos, the tuxedo boy I adopted from the Humane Society.

I am within shouting distance of the end of Enemy Within.  It naturally follows then, when I had to go to the dentist yesterday for those appointments we all have to honor once every six months, that *this* visit would be anything but routine.  It started well.  Then the dentist came by.  "Ah.  The time has come," she said.  "We really must replace that filling in your upper molar.  It's falling apart."  Small wonder.  That filling has been there since the third grade.  Let's not discuss the number of decades that have pa