Michele Antigone Knight, known to her friends as Micky, was born in the bayou country outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. She had a rough childhood, her mother was a teenager who hadn’t chosen to be pregnant and had little choice but to marry the man Micky considers her father, a man much older than her mother. But her mother wasn’t content to remain in the bayous married to a man she didn’t love and left …
No, It’s Not Okay to Email Your Four Hundred and Sixty-two Page Manuscript. Or even your fifty page first chapter. The gods of Office Depot do not give editors price breaks on printer paper, toner cartridges, etc. If you, the author, aren’t willing to tend to your brand new spanking baby book, then it’s ever less likely that an overworked editor wants to take on the task.
The first rule–really the only rule, the one you can never break or get around, is that you have to do the work. A book doesn’t get written in a burst of inspiration. A book gets written day after day, page by page by page. Sometimes it takes years and you will have to claw time out of your days when too many things already demand your time. The part of writing that’s seen, open to public scrutiny–the book signings, readings, articles in the paper or on radio or TV–is about five percent of what an author does. The other ninety-five percent is sitting alone in our rooms starting at a computer screen or page in a typewriter or a blank sheet of paper.
