Last December while I was balancing on a rickety ladder to hang a string of lights above my fireplace mantel, I got ‘the call.’ I almost didn’t answer. I’d left the phone lying over on the kitchen counter—within sight, but out of reach. I told myself by the time I scrambled down and dashed over there, whoever it was would probably have already hung up. But what if it was New York? (It was never New York, but still, that’s what I’d been hoping and praying for ever since sending my manuscript out weeks earlier.) When I left teaching, there was already a fully formed story in my head, begging to be put into words. So what if I’d never taken a writing course? I had a master’s degree. I could do this! For the next two years, I wrote and I wrote…making every mistake a writer could possibly make along the way. I was clueless. When a fellow member of my local Romance Writers of America chapter asked me what genre I wrote in, I replied, “genre?” The manuscript was rejected a dozen times, and rightly so. Only then did I realize that there’s an actual craft to putting…