JamieCarie Jamie, describe yourself for our visitors.

I am a big optimist! I try to see the best in people and situations and I really enjoy spending time with friends and my family.  I enjoy shopping, especially shoe shopping! I am a true girly-girl who loves glitz and glam.

I LOVE music and listen to everything from 3 Doors Down to Casting Crowns to movie soundtracks which makes great writing music! Here are some links to some of my current favorite songs:

How do you find time to connect with God?

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Moody Radio. I enjoy Mike MacDonald’s preaching and Midday Connection.  The hosts are wonderful women and the guests always have something that speaks to my heart. The current topic is "Rewriting Your Emotional Script" by Becky Harling. It’s about dealing with past hurts and trauma. Really eye opening! And then there is always reading the Bible! I am reading 1 Peter right now.

Who are your favorite authors? Favorite books?

This changes all of the time and is hard to answer. Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers is an all time favorite. Gone with the Wind (of course;), Flowers in the Storm by Laura Kinsale is my favorite romance of all time and many more from the best-sellers list to the classics.

Tell us about your journey to publication.

I started my first novel when my eldest son was five (he’s 18 now!). It was pretty bad, a meandering plot of scenes from my favorite novels strung together like mismatched beads on a necklace. But it was a crash course in novel writing, and I was so proud to have finished it! Knowing that it wasn’t good enough to try to publish, I began my second novel. Snow Angel was born on a frosty night in an old farmhouse in Fishers, Indiana, where the cold floor gave me plenty of motivation for the snow scene. After the first chapter, I knew I had something good, something special. A couple of years later, armed with my jewel, I sat out to get it published.

And so began some of the hardest years of waiting that I have yet endured. When I look back on it, I can hardly believe all the crazy things that happened. (I feel the need to insert a graph or table, some timeline or something to explain it all:). I began my search for publication by doing the conference thing, meeting with editors and learning the submission process, studying the publishing houses and markets for romance novels. Then I sent out several query letters to both ABA and CBA publishing houses. It took months and sometimes years to hear back, but each one was a rejection letter. I wasn’t sure what to do next, so just kept researching and waiting.

My first break came in 2000 when Time Warner started an online writing group called iPublish. There was a lot of talk at that time about ebooks and how big they might become, so TW thought to tap into that market with an online community of writers providing the content for these ebooks. I signed up to be a beta tester for the website and within a couple of months got a call from an editor with Time Warner.

They LOVED my book and felt that in this new format they could stretch out into something on the inspirational side with little risk on their end. Now, I wasn’t crazy about the whole ebook idea, but by that point, I was pretty desperate, so I signed the contract, hoped that my book would be so successful that they would eventually print it and looked at the whole thing like a possible springboard for my career.

After 9/11 I received the news that Time Warner was shutting down the ebook division and letting all the ebook authors out of their contracts. One of the editors went to bat for my book to be traditionally published in trade paperback because she loved it so much. These were months of living on gut-wrenching hope, but it was determined that it was too inspirational.

I sank into a minor depression for a couple of months after that and didn’t write anything. I kept praying and asking God what was going on, wondering what His will was for my life. It felt horrible to think of letting my dream go, but I wanted to prove to Him and myself that it wasn’t bigger than He was to me. (I went through this process several times during the ensuing years!).

But my desire to write soon surged through me so strong that I was back at the keyboard. By this time I was knee-deep into homeschooling my two boys which lead to various writing opportunities with our co-op (skits, poems, short stories, teaching writing, etc.) and doing some newsletter work for my church. But I wanted to write novels and decided to begin another one and send out queries again.

Now I could at least add my Time Warner experience to my cover letter which I hoped would give me some credibility. In 2002, I got a letter requesting the full manuscript from one ABA publisher. Their blub said they were the “family channel” of romance novels and I thought it might be a good fit. The only problem was that I had a 110,000 word novel and they only wanted 80,000 words. I started cutting like crazy. Anything that wasn’t “jump off the page” good was cut. At first, this was really hard to do. But after a while I noticed something. The story gained pace and emerged stronger than I could have imagined. Like a diamond being cut, it really began to sparkle and shine. Excited, I mailed it in.

That was the beginning of two harrowing years of next to no communication from the publisher. I called, I emailed, I begged, they just kept putting me off. Finally I threw up my hands (probably railed at God about how unfair life was) and sent it off to a few more publishers.
If you’re wondering if I was looking for an agent during these times, the answer is, of course! But I had always heard that getting an agent was even harder than getting a publisher on a first time book, so I had little hope there. But I did try hard. One day, I was online looking up agents and came across an agency that I had never seen before. They had an online form so I thought I wouldn’t have to wait quite so long to hear back and . . . why not? I was shocked to get a call from one of their agents who had just relocated to India
napolis. Within minutes of talking, he asked if I would like to meet him somewhere with the manuscript. With my five year old son’s hand firmly clasped in mine (I’d had a third son by then) we walked around a Boarders book store in search of my new agent.

I was a nervous wreck as I handed it over to him, believing he was my ticket to publication. He read it and loved it. So again, I signed the papers without knowing very much about him. Now this man was a really wonderful person, but he had never sold fiction before, only non-fiction in the technology field. He was able, however, to get the editor I had been waiting on to finally give me an answer (I think he sent her chocolates – really). The answer was “no.” It just didn’t quite fit their list.

During the next ten months, I continued to have great hope that my agent would sell my book. At the end of the tenth month with him, realizing he hadn’t sent out more than two proposals, I decided to take a leap of faith and part ways. This terrified me, because now I was back on my own, but I honestly thought I could do a better job myself, and I kept hearing that still, quiet voice say, “I’ll be your agent.”

“Really?” My slacker-faith self asked.

“If I am for you, who can be against you?”

“Really?” I whispered as tears began to flow down my cheeks.

Armed with fresh faith, two novels finished and the beginning of the third one, I set out to query every possible Christian and non-Christian publishing company that had ever published a romance novel. I poured over each word and sentence in that query letter. I used a sample proposal from a well-known agency as a template and polished my 40 page proposal until it glared.

Then, in November 2005, I sat at my kitchen table and looked at the giant stack of brown envelopes. A part of me felt hope, a part of me felt fear, but a big part of me said, “This is it, Lord. If this doesn’t work, I’m going back to college, getting a degree in advertising or something creative. I have too much creative energy inside me not to be doing something with it. Then, surprisingly, my sister dropped by on her way to work. Jennifer is something of a prayer warrior and we laid hands on the stack and prayed over it, asking God to bless each proposal.

Within two months I had a bite from Bethany House and B&H Publishing. Bethany eventually bowed out due to the fact that they had an “A-list” author already doing a series on Alaska. B&H gave me a call. I took the call out onto the deck where it was quiet.

“We want to publish your book.”

Long, deep breaths. Was this real? Would it work out this time? I was excited but wary. “I would love that.” I said simply. And, in the months that followed, I found that I would. God even provided me with a wonderful agent to help navigate the contract! His timing is perfect, but it was hard to wait for the fruition of that.

WindDancer Tell us about your current book.

Wind Dancer is really close to my heart as it is set in Vincennes, Indiana, my hometown. I created the story around the famous George Rogers Clark and the American Revolutionary time period. God really amazed me with my main characters though! Isabelle is the strongest woman I’ve ever written. And yet, God allows her to be challenged in ways that leave her devastated and totally dependent on him. And Samuel? He reminds me of Hawkeye from one of my favorite movies, The Last of the Mohicans. Very strong, protective, frontiersman type.

How did you come up with ideas for this book?

I knew I wanted to tell the story of George Rogers Clark without writing a biography about him. So the setting and the timeline were basically set in stone. Then I just sat down and pretty much wrote by the seat of my pants! It was a tough book to write. I had to go back and fix parts and change it when I knew it wasn’t working. But I do believe that God guided me back on the right path, and I’m thrilled with the end result.

List your three most recent books.

* What’s next for you?

My fourth book, Love’s First Light will be out July 2009. It is set during the French Revolution (yes, I like to set stories all over the map and in many different time periods!:) in Paris and Carcassonne, France. B&H, my awesome publisher, did a wonderful job on the cover art and the book trailer!

Where can visitors find you online?

My website is http://jamiecarie.com/

My blog is http://jamieprose.blogspot.com/

I’m having two great contests on my blog the last two weeks of January. You could win free, signed copies of Wind Dancer, DVD’s and a $150 gift certificate for a red dress (Isabelle wears a red dress in the story) at www.edressme.com! I wish I could enter myself!!

And I have facebook, myspace, twitter and shoutlife pages. I would love more friends!!