"THE CALL" Blog Hop: Part 1

Happy Monday, everyone!

Hope your week is getting off to a great start! Today is Part One of the Seymour Agency "THE CALL" blog hop hosted by the Seymour Agency Promotions Manager, Tonya Kuper! Want to know what happened before I got "the call" from my wonderful agent Nicole Resciniti? Check out my answer to the questions below.

TONYA: Before "the call." What category and genre do you write?  What to you do other than write? How did you end up in contact with your agent from the Seymour Agency (cold query, conference, etc.)? Did you communicate with your agent before you got "the call" from them (did you talk at a conference, email, do a Revise & Resubmit)? 

KAIT:  I write adult paranormal romance as Kait Ballenger, and Y.A urban fantasy and contemporary New Adult under my maiden name, Kaitlyn Schulz. Other than writing, I work part time at an assisted living facility as an activities director, caring mainly for Alzheimer's and dementia patients. I'm a professional English tutor and I've been known to dabble in professional Egyptian cabaret bellydancing (seriously) ;-) I'm also a student in Spalding University's Masters of Fine Arts program, where I'm earning my degree, so I can teach creative writing at a university level. 

I ended up in contact with Nicole through a chain of very lucky events. I met Mary Sue Seymour, the head agent and founder of the Seymour Agency, on an elevator while at the Romance Writers of America conference in NYC in 2011. When Mary Sue asked what genre I wrote and I told her paranormal, she gave me her card and told me to query Nicole. I sent Nicole a cold query and received a full request for my paranormal romance manuscript the very next day (now TWILIGHT HUNTER, the first novel in my Execution Underground series, releasing this September). It took me a little while to get the full manuscript to Nicole, as there were edits I wanted to do based on things I learned from the conference. But once I sent it to her, she emailed me the next day asking if I'd written the novel targeting Harlequin and asked if I could lengthen or shorten the word count accordingly if it were submitted to a category or single-title line. I replied, yes, that I would be willing to do that. My phone rang with an unknown number several minutes later. I don't pick up numbers I don't know, but then when my voicemail 'dinged' and I listened to it, it was Nicole calling to offer representation. I know now that she had laid in bed that morning and read the majority of my book on her cell phone! The thought of someone being that entranced over my work still amazes me. And Nic was right from the start, my manuscript ended up at Harlequin with their single-title HQN line!

Check back on Wednesday to read about the actual "call" part of mine and Nicole's conversation!