PATHS TO PUBLICATION - MARIA V. SNYDER
Fire Study by Maria V. Snyder Ahhh...the publishing story. Gather round and make yourself comfortable. It all started because of boredom (if you don't want the "how I started writing bit" - skip to the next paragraph) Fresh out of Penn State with a meteorology degree I landed a job doing environmental consulting (air quality). Consulting work is either feast or famine and during slow times I started writing science fiction and fantasy short stories. Most unpublishable and none sold - but a guest speaker at a local writer's con thought I had potential. So I continued to write short stories. After my son was born, I had the idea for Poison Study and thought, Why not? Maybe short fiction isn't my thing. So I joined a local critique group and started submitting a chapter a month - meanwhile I had my daughter - and all that goes with a newborn. Five years after I started the novel, it was finished and went through two years of revisions. Poison Study (PS