Stephanie Jaye Evans

This is so exciting.  You can see the website here.

This book was a happen-upon for me—I wasn’t familiar with the writer (this is her first novel, though Wingfield is a seasoned scriptwriter) and I hadn’t heard the title spoken of.  Wingfield started leisurely, and I was interested if not engaged.  But before I knew it, her beautifully drawn characters had me completely invested.  There are some dark, dark scenes, but overall, this is an eloquent, lyrical story of redemption and triumph.  Wingfield may be the first contemporary writer I’ve read who has created a likeable hero who is also a conservative Christian.  Imagine my surprise when he didn’t turn out to be a psychotic sadist, or a bent and delusional man, the way Christians are so often portrayed.   I gave the book five stars on my Goodreads account.

These are the galleys of my book, Faithful Unto Death—the advanced copies that go out to reviewers in the hope that they might read it and say something nice about the book.        It is the final stage before the book itself comes out.

I love the book and I’m proud of it.  But I’m not the reason the book is sitting there on my agent’s desk.

The book is there because my father and mother, Dwain and Barbara Evans, pushed me to go back to school, pushed me to do my best, pushed me to write my best.

And because my sister and brother-in-law made sure I wasn’t isolated and alone while I did it.

And my husband, Richard Box, read it and proofed it and believed in it.

And my Rice University professors, David Schneider and Dennis Huston, mentored it.

And Harriette Sackler and Arleen Trundy and Joan Gottesman of Malice Domestic saw something worth developing in the first draft and awarded it one of their two 2010 William F. Deeck – Malice Domestic Grants for Unpublished Writers.

And Janet Reid made me hone it and tone it until she could sell it to…

Shannon Jamieson Vazquez who made me rewrite it three more times until it met the high standards of Penguin Putnam’s Berkeley Prime Crime.

So that’s why I’m calling Faithful Unto Death

the book, not my book (okay, I’m going to slip sometimes, but you know what I mean).  So many of you have offered expert advice and encouragement and valuable criticism.  It isn’t just my book anymore, and it’s a much better book because of that.  Thank you.

Tuesday at five o’clock in the evening, I sent my agent, Janet Reid, a 96,500 word manuscript—the first draft of my second Sugar Land Mystery, Now the Darkness Gathers.

Janet lives and works in Manhattan, so that was six o’clock her time. At twelve thirty-nine a.m. of Wednesday the next morning (that’s Houston time—it was past one-thirty for Janet), she emailed that she had finished the book. She included a complete and very specific list of revisions she would like me to make.
Now, just so you know, an agent’s job is to sell your book. Janet sold mine nearly a year ago. Many agents, maybe most agents, would consider their job entirely done at that point. Very, very few would stay up until the wee hours to read a raw manuscript, and then take the time to offer you clear and precise and much needed direction. That doesn’t happen. Not that I’ve heard about.
Janet did that.
I’m not going to fib here—I cried like a baby—a badly behaved baby– when I saw the changes I needed to make. Then I remembered all that Texas blood I have to live up to and read the revision requests again. They were dead on. Every single one.
You cannot pay for that kind of mentoring. It’s a gift. A blessing.