Janie is ready!

After adding roughly 4000 words and making a handful of changes to the manuscript, Janie Hannagan: Dream Catcher is ready! My agent will begin submitting the manuscript to editors sometime this week.

A few weeks ago, at my agent's suggestion, I picked up Stephenie Meyer's first book, Twilight. Though my book has nothing to do with vampires, my agent said my writing style was similar to Stephenie's and he thought Janie would appeal to the same audience as Twilight.

I've never enjoyed, cared about, or read a vampire book in my life, but I'm always looking for interesting YA books. And once I started reading, I couldn't put this book down. I had no idea vampires could be designed to be so intriguing as what Stephenie has done with the Cullens. Wow! I had to read more, so I picked up her second book, New Moon, which is the sequel to Twilight.

Meanwhile, I made my husband Matt read Twilight. I didn't mention to him what agent Michael had said about my writing style being similar to Stephenie's. After the first few chapters of Twilight, Matt said "This sounds like your writing." Interrrresting.

I found Stephenie's website and discovered that not only is she a wildly successful and popular author, she is also practically my neighbor. (Okay, okay, she lives an hour away, but here in the southwest, that's not much). She's doing a booksigning at my local library tomorrow so I think I'll go say hello and get my books signed.