I will remember the turn of the road, the light that had gone from green to red and the many cars surrounding me forever. I will remember the moment my fingers opened her email and the panic that found itself in me soon after. I had imagined this moment. Full of excitement and happiness. But as my heart thumped in me and my body trembled under the weight of the seat belt, it was anxiety that had swept over me. She wanted a call with me. I could barely breathe. And as the light turned green, I called my husband in a state of panic and excitement. It had happened. A literary agent had wanted to talk to me, finally. And then I shrieked in his ears as I almost ran a red light. This was not my normal. This had been an anomaly. A day in time I will always remember. A moment when a chanced dream of becoming an author had crossed my engineer brain and found me down this twisty, turn-y and very often exhausting road called becoming an author.

My fingers had opened many literary agent emails before this one. Each one complementary in tone, gushing about my writing and my premise….and my heart leaped imagining the words I had wanted to hear, like a girl about to be proposed. Instead they’d said…but….I am sorry but this is not for me. Suddenly stuck back in a maze, with no exit, I had contemplated leaving this field. I was an engineer and from the looks of it a decent one. I didn’t need this torture. I had been tortured through six years of engineering school. Yet, I persisted because of a dream that had found it’s home in me. One of becoming an author. I had been swayed by the many times someone had told me I could write. But could I? I asked myself repeatedly as I lay awake at night after a rejection. I was trained to be logical….my brain had been wired to find a root cause to a rejection. Yet, I struggled because the complementary words did not match the outcome that followed.

As I sat on my bed, waiting for the call with my now agent, I could not fathom if this was a dream or a reality. If my logical brain had been so skewed by rejections that it had made up a success. And when she appeared on the screen, I knew it was real. And as she praised my book and the characters, I sat there numb and excited – all in one. This was all I had ever wanted for the past nine years. Someone who passionately loved my work as much as I did. After several near misses, almost signing with agents, I had survived the process and got to the other side. And I will always be thankful to her, my agent Taj, for welcoming me to the other side. One where I can call myself an agented author. Where my name has the words ‘represented by’ next to it. And as we start this new partnership in publishing, I am excited to see where it takes me…and us.