When I was eight years old, I told everyone I met what I wanted to be when I grew up: an author. Thirty-three years later, that dream finally came true.
It wasn’t the path I expected – but, really, when is the path ever what we expect?
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Even so, through everything I’ve done in life, writing and telling stories have been at my core. It was there when:
- I won my first writing contest in sixth grade through a local young writers’ contest.
- I met an author for the first time and realized, ‘Wow, people really do this!’ (I was about 12 at the time).
- I wrote my first novel in high school about very high school matters and then subsequently scoured through heavy tomes of the Writer’s Market and queried literary agents.
- I received rejection after rejection for the aforementioned novel, which I considered my ‘training wheels’ and introduction to the world of publishing.
- I returned to short stories and poems in college, processing things that had happened in my life.
- I set out to start a ‘career’ and knew that, in some form or another, I wanted to tell stories. I did—just not in the ways I might have expected. Over the past 20 or so odd years, I’ve written about travel, food (including a stint as a hot dog reporter), mergers and acquisitions, restaurants, TV shows, movies, books, finance, public health… and the list goes on and on.
- I went to grad school at The University of Chicago to study humanities and creative writing and learned a great deal from some incredible writers, including Elizabeth Crane and Daniel Raeburn.
- I earned an Honorable Mention in a short story competition judged by author George Saunders.
- I finished my graduate thesis, a historical fiction novel about Charlotte Corday, and once again sent it out to literary agents. This time, I got a few nibbles, including requests for the full manuscript, but no official bites. (I recently completely rewrote it; stay tuned!)
- I volunteered to teach young kids about how to develop characters and write short stories.
- I joined writing groups. Basically, every time I moved, I looked for a community of writers.
- I had Writing Wednesday meet-ups with my other writing friends.
- I published multiple short stories and essays in anthologies, including two Chicken Soup for the Soul books.
- I filled journal after journal about my life but also with my ideas.
I’ll admit, things changed quite a bit after I had my two kids. My writing “for fun” got placed on the back burner, if only because I was sleep-deprived and still working part-time to help make ends meet.
But this is also the time when some new ideas started to flourish. I scribbled down snippets in the wee hours of the morning, during nap times, or in spare moments whenever I could catch them. I read picture book after picture book with my kids, and at some point, I thought: I could do this. After all, I made up stories for my kids all the time!
In 2019, I wrote the first draft of Etta Betta and the Beast for my daughter, and when—after some trusted writing partners critiqued it—I finished the text and reached out to one of my sisters and asked: “Could you help bring this story to life?”
My sister Maggie SanFilippo has been an artist since we were little kids, too. She’s done everything from painting sets out in Hollywood to working in galleries, and she has this beautiful style that reminds me a bit of Dave McKean (the illustrator for Neil Gaiman’s The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, one of my daughter’s favorites). But her style is really and truly her own. (Go check out more of her art).
To make a long story short, we made a “book dummy,” and I once again started querying literary agents and small presses. Once again, there were many no’s and “this isn’t the right fit for me at this time.”
But then a personal rejection came along, and it made all the difference. In the agent’s reply, she said that we may find it hard to sign with an agent who would take both the author AND illustrator since we’re two different people. (Often, agents will take an author-illustrator—aka a person who does the writing and drawing—or just an author).
My sister and I were in this together from day one, and that was not about to change just to fit the mold of traditional publishing. We both recognized that self-publishing gave us the freedom to make this a book we both truly wanted. And so we decided to self-publish, together.
On November 11, 2024, the book officially launched.
Etta Betta and the Beast—a story about the friendship between a girl and her bulldog—is now available in paperback and hardcover.
And the first time I held it in my hands? I couldn’t stop smiling. I did it—I published a book, and the process was made all the sweeter since my sister Maggie was by my side through it all.
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What questions do you have about the publishing process? Ask them here, and I may answer them in a future Oops & Daisies post!
