www.morpheustales.com however, only fuelled my desire to get published and I submitted my manuscript to as many agencies as I could find online with an “open submission” policy. I was determined to achieve my goal. Creatures Rule the Night started as part of a poetry assignment in my high school English class. Later, my teacher, looking to expand our creative writing abilities, asked us to write a short story. The poem that I had written months before became the perfect catalyst and by my senior year the idea of a novel began to take shape. While studying history and politics in college, I worked on my manuscript from time to time adding Revelation to the beginning of the title when I began to envision a trilogy in order to tell my entire story. In 2002, the same year that my oldest son was born, I got my first break in seeing Revelation published. Digital books were just starting to grow in popularity and a small independent eBook company, Gateway Publishers, signed me to my first contract releasing my title that same year. I remember thinking that this was going to be my big moment; my chance for the entire world to read my work. It wouldn’t be long before we were talking book advancements and movie rights. How young and naïve I was. In eight years I sold two copies of my book and made exactly $1 in royalties. During that time my family grew and I retreated to working and supporting my children. Every so often I would work a little bit more on my second manuscript but writing had taken a back burner to life. Then, in 2008, I realized that I was missing something; a passion that had driven me since I was a teenager. Writing had always been my means of expression. Without it, I had bottled up years of emotions and hid away from the talent I had been blessed with.
On a daily basis, I began to write again, adding pages and pages of material to Revelation’s sequel. I wrote five chapters but stopped when I noticed something very different in my style of writing. The years had changed me; growing up, experiencing life had given me a new perspective. The sequel looked nothing like the original so I decided to make a big change. Leaving behind the second book I decided to rewrite Revelation: Creatures Rule the Night. For two years I worked on it in my free time, and by 2010 I had a completely new manuscript with three new chapters and over 20,000 more words. It was also at that time, after speaking with my eBook publisher, that we decided to part ways from each other giving me the freedom to resubmit my work to other companies. It took eight months of submitting queries (at least a dozen a month) before another publishing agency gave me a new opportunity. August 28, 2011: I have great pleasure in informing you of our acceptance of your submission. – Damnation Books LLC/Eternal Press. I almost didn’t catch it at first, expecting to the see word the “unfortunately” somewhere in the first two sentences. But that wasn’t the case. It had taken me eighteen years, but my book was finally going to be in print and available through a large number of vendors and outlets in the US and in several other countries. I was no longer chasing a dream but instead staring at my future. Given a March 2012 release date, I began to reach out online and started making friends with other writers in my genre on Facebook and in Yahoo groups. At first I had reached out to other authors published by Damnation Books, but quickly found myself communicating daily with a number of writers (both published and independent). Not only did I find this community welcoming, I discovered a world of books I would have never heard of or read before. I 46