I heard about the 2002 New Historical Voice contest about forty-eight hours before the entry deadline. I had already relegated She Who Laughs Last to a final resting-place under the bed, having received little or no interest from more agents than I care to remember. In short, I’d lost faith in it.

Then I saw a posting by Renee Halverson, the 2001 winner, and thought "What the heck?" I sprinted off to the post office and sent it in by Express Mail. Then – this is the truth – I forgot about it until I received a notice from Dorchester that my entry had "piqued their interest," and would I submit the full. Sure, said I, why not? I had NO expectation of getting further, having learned there were over two hundred entries and at least twenty semi-finalists. There’s a huge pool of talent out there and this was only my second book. (The first is best forgotten.)

My only hope of being a finalist and/or winning lay in the fact that She Who Laughs Last is a medieval. In announcing the contest, Dorchester had emphasized that they’d like to see historical periods other than just Westerns, which had dominated the entries in 2001. So maybe a medieval would catch their eye.

On September 6 the wonderful Kate Seaver (now my editor) called from Dorchester to tell me I was a finalist. It’s strange – when I thought I didn’t have a chance I really didn’t care. Now I was caring with a vengeance, since the winner would receive a contract from Dorchester. 

One part of the contest was the posting of the first three chapters of the finalists on the Romantic Times web site so that readers could vote for their favorite. If I understand it correctly, the partials were also sent to a number of RT "bookstores that care." I read the other two entries – Shari Boullion’s A Stolen Time and Karen Lingefelt’s True Pretenses – and because the quality of their work was so high I knew right off that they weren’t the Competition, they were Colleagues. The three of us started up an online correspondence and we remain friends to this day.

"Winning" the New Voice contest is good for the ego, of course; it did bring the wonderful Michelle Grajkowski of Three Seas Literary Agency into my life; and I received a contract from Dorchester for the book and an option (now under consideration). But what it really did for me was to open a door I myself had closed. I lost faith in a book I had loved writing and, for a time when I was getting rejections left and right, in myself. It isn’t a gang of faceless, heartless, vicious editors and agents out there who slam the door in our faces. We often do it ourselves very nicely, without their help.

I learned about the New Historical Voice contest by sheer luck, entered it because I couldn’t let the book of my head and heart go, and won it – well, I’m not entirely sure why I won it. That’s not false modesty – it’s God’s honest truth. But thank you Renee, Dorchester, RT readers and booksellers, and the patron saint of the unpublished, whoever you are!

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