Sarah Pinneo celebrates the publication of her debut novel, Julia’s Child, this week, missing her self-imposed 40^th birthday deadline by a few months. Jenny Nelson, author of Georgia’s Kitchen, calls it “a savory read packed with humor and heart” – which might also describe Sarah’s post below. Enjoy them both! – Meg

When I sat down to write my first novel in 2007, I had notes for it stretching back to 1994. That book was about Wall Street—it was a disaster story of greed gone wrong. The timing might have been perfect.

As it happened, that was not the case.

The book took over a year to write, and then querying agents took another six months. The very week my book went out on submission, the Bear Sterns near bankruptcy and fire sale hit. Suddenly, the news was papered over with stories of failing investment banks, each one bigger than the last. And my funny book about a minor scandal was all wrong. The disaster was too small, the actors too quirky. A novel which would have fit logically into New York’s landscape for a decade was instantly dated.

Never mind that I’d spent twelve years on a trading floor, collecting character sketches and fragments of traderspeak. The book smacked of authenticity—only one year too late. My new agent failed to sell it, as I knew he would. I bemoaned this fate to other writers, one of whom confessed that he’d finished a major piece about Afghanistan in August of 2001. Oops.

So I’m not the only one who has ever produced an ill-timed book. Even before I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I sat down to write another novel. This one was also about business, but only on the face of it. Julia’s Child is a comedy about food obsessed moms, and about burning with ambition for the thing you most want. In the book, crunchy mom Julia Bailey lives for the day when her organic toddler meals will be stocked on the shelves of Whole Foods. It doesn’t take a genius to notice how closely Julia’s grocery store shelf longings mirror my bookstore shelf desires. I poured all of my misfired ambition into the new storyline.

Unsurprisingly, Julia’s Child was a much better book than my first effort. The themes wove themselves together on the page with what seemed like magic. The tangled web of motherhood, fear, and ambition that I’d been caught inside came out quickly as a fun ride of a novel. By the time I finished it, a year later, I knew I had something even better than my Wall Street story. Not only was I proud of the story, I knew it to be topical and more marketable than its predecessor.

I printed it out on bright white paper, packed it in a box and delivered it to my agent.

Immediately after reading it, he fired me. By email.

That was, as they say, the low point. I felt like crawling under my bed and staying there. But since I also craved vindication, I started sending out query letters. I’d queried before, and I felt confident about my letter. So I queried broadly. And sixty days later, I had three offers of representation.

Soon after, I went to hear multi-bestselling novelist Alice Hoffman speak. During the Q&A, someone asked her what she was working on next. “I don’t like to say,” she shrugged “because sometimes things don’t pan out.”

Ms. Hoffman has, by my count, 29 published works of fiction. And if even Alice Hoffman cannot be sure that number thirty will be a keeper, then I should probably find away to let go of my potential future failures, even before they happen.

This time, things worked out. Julia’s Child was sold to a publisher I adore, becoming my lucky number one. I’m grateful to Julia for proving to me that it can be done—and I’ll try not to be too hard on myself if her successor gives me the run around. – Sarah

Terry McMillan calls this week’s guest author, Meredith Maran, “a powerful storyteller with a big heart and a big talent.” Her first novel, A Theory of Small Earthquakes, is out this week from Soft Skull Press. Meredith was first published in Seventeen Magazine when she was … 17. She’s since published so many books and articles that you’d think she’s found the easy road to being a writer. Her lovely post is perhaps the most compelling evidence I’ve yet had that none exists. – Meg

Sitting here with my laptop in my, um, lap, pondering the question, “How do writers get started?” I have to laugh. What you’re reading now is the third start I’ve made on this little essay, and I’m still not sure it’ll stick.

And therein lies the story of starting. You start. You stop. You start. You stop again. And then suddenly you start—a blog post, a poem, a story, a novel—and you don’t stop. You can’t. You get stuck, you walk away, you throw a hissy fit, you break up with your project, but still the blinking cursor pulls you back. Can you leave a bowl of Chocolate Fudge Brownie half-eaten? No, you cannot.

You wrestle with the plot, the point, the characters, the structure. Most of all (and yes, this is inevitable and no, there are no exceptions) you wrestle with your demon doubts. Your writing sucks, publishing sucks, your childhood sucked, your computer sucks, you suck most of all. Still, you need to move that cursor down the screen. You need to fill the page, the section, the chapter. You need to find out what happens: to the story, and to you in writing it. Without realizing you’re thinking it, you think that maybe when you finish, nothing will suck quite as much as it did before. And there’s only one way to find out. Keep going. Finish. And see.

Sounds pretty airy-fairy coming from a writer who’s earned her living, paltry as it’s been at times, doing exactly that since I was seventeen years old. Following the thought to the words, the words to the page, the page to publication. True: when I published my first article in Seventeen in 1968, my first anthology contribution in 1970, my first book in 1971, I didn’t believe in shaving my armpits, let alone celebrity; money was irrelevant, almost unnecessary, and in my adolescent wisdom I believed that my smooth path from impulse to print would continue to roll on like that forever.

It did, and it didn’t. I’ve written books that have been denied publication despite the Herculean efforts of all concerned, and I’ve been paid shocking amounts of money for books that rolled off my fingers like honey spools off a spoon. I’ve rejoiced over my writing career and I’ve wept rivers over my writing career. But as the decades have passed and the technologies and the trends and the economics and the cruelties of the publishing-industrial complex have destroyed careers far hardier than mine, one thing has remained true: I can’t not write.

If I have to cut my so-called lifestyle down to the bone, if I have to write website copy for pharmaceutical corporations, if I have to soothe my fears of the future with vague dreams of miracles to come—I have to keep writing. Because the worst day writing is better than the best day in a grey flannel cubicle. (And believe me, I’ve got a long list of ex-employers who would agree.) Because there is simply no better feeling than the one I’m having right now: it’s flowing, it’s going, I’m in it, and it’s in me, so I don’t need to start over. I just need to start writing the next thing. – Meredith

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest is open for submissions through February 5 – or until they’ve got 5,000 submissions in each category (YA and General Fiction), whichever comes first. Winners will be published by Penguin, with a $15,000 Advance.

Wouldn’t it be nice if fellow SheWriters took the prizes?

Do share what you are you planning to enter in the comments below! - Meg

I’m the nationally bestselling author of The Four Ms. Bradwells (just out in paperback as a Random House Reader’s Circle Selection), The Wednesday Sisters, The Language of Light, and the forthcoming The Wednesday Daughters.

Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature, was born on January 24, 1862, 150 years ago today.

Born Edith Newbold Jones into a wealthy American family – her family is said to have been the Joneses of “keeping up with the Joneses” fame – she was raised in part in Europe, and published her first stories and poetry even before she made her debut in society.

She went on the write 49 volumes of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Some of her most famous works explore the precarious position of women who defy society’s expectations, through characters including Lily Bart in The House of Mirth and Countess Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence.

Wharton also designed and built The Mount, a country home in Lenox, Massachusetts, which is now a National Historic Landmark, one of very few dedicated to women.

A number of events to celebrate the sesquicentennial of her birth are planned throughout the spring.

Are you a Wharton fan? Please share your favorite Wharton book or poem in the comment section below, or perhaps ever your favorite film adaptation! – Meg

“A word after a word
after a word is power.”
- from “Spelling” by Margaret Atwood
which is an amazing poem.

“You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence … If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so there had to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start in an exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know that it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later you wonder whether it may not be all right after all.”

Is there a writer out there who has not felt this way?

That’s Agatha Christie, from An Autobiography, in which she also describes the rejection of her first novel, and says of a writer who encouraged her early on, “I can hardly express the gratitude I feel to him.”

Happy writing in 2012! May the literary gods be kind to you.

Meg