Martha Bends The Laws of Space-Time

I decided to become a young adult writer on August 17th, 2008.

A friend of mine who works at Scholastic shipped me an ARC of Suzanne Collin's The Hunger Games. I read it in one sitting less than four hours long. It was like an injection of literary crack between my toes, straight into my veins, into my frickin' eyeballs. I couldn't think, sleep, dream anything but young adult novels from that point forward. Of course, my appetite had been whet several months before with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series but it was The Hunger Games that showed me YA is where it's at.

It has been one year and one month since that date.

One year and one month of:

- completing a manuscript
- signing with an agent
- going on editorial submission
- joining the Brain Trust critique group
- building a website and personal blog
- writing half of manuscript #2
- attending two national writing conferences
- meeting and joining with the Pens Fatales group blog
- forming/joining a YA That's Why critique group
- interning for a literary agent

All on top of daily life vagaries.

Lemme tell ya...I have days. Weeks.

Of ugh.
Of I'll never make it in this town!
Of I'm gonna be that person - who plugs away at an impossible dream until it is neither romantic nor inspirational but strangely pathetic because yes, that point happens - don't patronize me and don't regale me with stories of people who published after 50 years because I took statistics, dammit, and you can't fool me into thinking those data points count.

Maybe I will be that person. But that person is 49 years away, and I think if I could glimpse into the future by folding the fabric of space-time so that point 49 years in the future is bunched right up alongside now, I'd still see a happy me.