All about Sara

What I'm doing: Watching Big Brother 11 (Wooo hoooo. Good-bye Chima!)
What I'm listening to: Natalie complain about Chima getting kicked out
What I'm reading in my spare time: Bad Moon Rising


This is me, Sara Dailey. I've been married to a great man named Jeremy for 8 years and have a beautiful 4 year-old son named Gavin. I've taught 7th grade language arts for 6 years, but a year and a half ago, I started my first novel with my good friend Staci Weber. On some level I always wanted to be a writer, though I never thought I'd actually do it. I decided a few years back to take a writing class from the Institute of Children's Literature. I saw an ad in a parenting magazine and thought it sounded interesting. We had 10 assignments, and the final assignment was to write the first three chapters of a novel, which obviously made me a little nervous to say the least.

Lucky for me, I walked into Staci's classroom one morning (we work next door to one another) and she said, "Hey, I have an idea for a book." Appartently, Staci has some interesting dreams, which is great because it is from her funky dreams that our novel FALLEN was born (as well as about 10 other book ideas). She asked me if I wanted to write it together. Considering I had my final assignment coming up, I jumped on board. Did I honestly think we'd do it? No way! But lo and behold, we did. We worked almost every weekend at Barnes and Noble knocking out a chapter or so each time we met. And before we knew it, we were done. Or at least we thought we were. We did our research and began sending out queries to literary agents. Little did we know, it is really hard to get a novel published (okay, we knew; but it was harder than we thought). Originally, FALLEN was to be two books, but an agent we queried suggested that we make it one long novel. The advice was a blessing because FALLEN is a much stronger novel because of it.

After a full year of writing, we began querying literary agents again, as well as seeking publication straight from a couple of publishing companies. The day before Mother's Day, I received an email from Mundania Press. I couldn't have gotten a better Mother's Day gift than that. So, thank you Skyla if you ever read this. I read the email at least 10 times and then immediately called Staci. Of course, she didn't answer, and I wanted to kill her. But finally she called me back, and I couldn't have been more excited to tell her.

So here we are now. FALLEN is coming out late 2010, so we have quite a wait, but it's all worth it to know that we will actually get to see our first novel in print. There were many times that I didn't think it would happen. But it did and now I can't wait for what the future holds.

That's all for now.

More to come.