Technically, this story starts in the third grade, when little Lynn was taught how to write dialogue properly–with tags and commas and quotation marks and everything. This blew her easily-entertained mind, and essentially served as a gateway drug to atrocious stories with purple-eyed heroines, blind mole-men, and (on one dark occasion) heart-throb doppelgangers.
But for the sake of everyone’s sanity (especially my own) I’ll start about fourteen years later, in the spring of 2019. I’d been querying agents across multiple projects for about nine years at that point (my very first (awful) query being sent out when I was a wee lass of fourteen years stupid) and I had just completed my sixth manuscript–an adult space opera that actually had opera in it, because I’m as literal as a hunk of rock.