“You’ve finished your novel,” says a friend or family member to me.  “Now what?”

“Try to get it published,” I reply.

“Well duh,” says the friend or family member, “but how do you do that?”

“Simple,” I say.  “All it takes is faith and trust, and a little bit of pixie dust.”

My friend or family member’s eyebrows scrunch.  “Isn’t that how you fly?”

Oh, right.  I sometimes get mixed up, because getting published can seem about as impossible as flying.

The good news is, while no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to fly (somewhere, a fairy just fell down dead from my implication that there’s no such thing as pixie dust), persistent work may land me a publishing contract.  If I get lucky.  (See, I do believe in fairies, as well as their dust.)

What I’ve discovered inquiring non-writer minds want to know is:  what exactly is that work which, combined with luck, gets a writer published?  That’s what I’m here to tell you. Read the rest of this entry »