Today’s guest post is by Judy Merrill Larsen, who not only has the wisdom to be both a Cubs and a Springsteen fan, but also writes beautifully. Her first novel, All the Numbers, has become an international bestseller. – Meg

If I’ve learned anything at all about the world of publishing over the past nine years, it’s this: You Never Know. I find it’s just as true today as that first day in June of 1999 when I settled into the Adirondack chair on my front porch, uncapped my new ink pen and began to write All the Numbers.

And it’s a good thing I didn’t know what was in store for me because I’m not sure I’d have hung in there if I’d known how long it might take and how much rejection would be involved. But I also didn’t know the wonderful things that would happen either (more on that later).

So, that summer, I finished my draft and began sending out query letters. This was before e-mail queries. I typed, I printed, I stuffed, I sealed, I stamped, and I mailed. And then I waited to be discovered. Announced to the world. Invited to be on Oprah. Three hundred rejection letters later I was a bit wiser.

I rewrote. I revised. I kept my day job as a high school English teacher. But I also kept pursuing the craft of writing. Somewhere along the way I realized it was a process and an amazing adventure. With every rejection (well, maybe not every single one), I became more determined. I went back to the draft and polished and added and dug deeper. And I started reaching out to other writers. I began going to writing conferences. And collecting more rejections.

But whenever my confidence would start to wear thin, when I’d think, well, maybe it’ll never happen, my family and friends were there to bolster me. One dear friend always introduced me as “Judy, the novelist.” When I questioned or corrected her by saying, “No, not really” she looked me in the eye and said, “Hey. You wrote a novel. That makes you a novelist.” And eventually I began to believe her.

In 2004, five years after writing that first draft, I went to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. And there, in the shadows of their famed MFA program, surrounded by other novelists and poets and editors, I met an editor who liked my work, who also saw me as a novelist and who offered to introduce me to some agents. He warned me it might take awhile and not to give up. I nodded and smiled and thought to myself that I’d gotten pretty good at that whole not-giving-up thing.

Four days after sending my MS off to an agent, she called and offered to represent me. Suddenly those 300+ rejection letters up in my office (yes, I kept all of them) didn’t matter. I’d done it. I hadn’t given up, I’d kept revising, I’d put myself out there, and I had finally made it over a really high hurdle.

Four months later we sold it to Ballantine, and eighteen months later (almost seven years to the day of when I wrote the first words) I walked into a bookstore and there it was. I cried. I still get a thrill seeing it on the shelves.

But the “You Never Knows” just keep coming. I hadn’t foreseen the pride my sons would feel over my accomplishment. And when I said I wanted to give them one of my “author” copies, the older one said no, he and his brother wanted to walk into the store and plunk down their own money and buy their own copies. I hadn’t expected to hear from readers who loved my book, who connected to it in so many ways and who then would take the time to find my website and e-mail me about it. And their letters and stories made me fall in love with my characters all over again.

And then this summer, two years after its release here, it came out in Taiwan, and much to my surprise and delight it landed on all the bestseller lists there. I’d never imagined being an “international bestselling author” but I am.

You Just Never Know.

So, here I am, revising another manuscript for perhaps the seventh time, but I can relax and enjoy it and not let myself get too wrapped up in worry and doubt. Because while I have no idea what’s around the next publishing corner for me, I can’t wait to find out.

- Judy Merrill Larsen