Recently Facebook memories told me about a dream I’d had three years ago.
The Facebook post went like this:
I just had a dream that a literary agent was going to take on my novel and had already found me a publisher…on the condition I wrote a murder scene into the book, and turned the novel into a murder mystery. At that point, she assured me, ‘Agatha Christie Publishing’ would take it on.
The agent gave me ten minutes to write the murder scene…I was sent off with her assistant to my writing room, set at the top of a tall metal tower we could only get to by some super-fast UFO-like shuttle. When I got to my writing room it was filled with little old ladies catching up and having tea. So I had to go downstairs to the tower atrium to write.
Time was running out. My brain was nearly blank, but I gave myself a pep talk into a little mirror set into the wall. Then I wrote and wrote and it was good! When the agent arrived, I showed her my scene.
Which I had written in BROCCOLI.
Clumps of broccoli sat on the paper, each little floret representing a word I could not remember. I could not for the life of me tell her what I had written.
End of dream. 
This may be hard to believe, but that dream did not come true. I don’t have a murder mystery novel written in broccoli and I’m not being published by Agatha Christie Publishing.
BUT!
I DID write a new book about a year and a half ago—a YA novel called How It Feels To Float, about a girl and grief and mental illness and losing yourself and love holding you up as you find yourself again.
And then an agent DID take on my novel! The amazing Catherine Drayton of Inkwell Management. And she wonderfully found me not just one publisher, but TWO.
And now I’m getting published!!!!
My book is coming out next May with Dial/Penguin Random House in North America and Pan Macmillan in Australia and NZ. It’s been an amazing ride so far, and it’s only been three and a half months. I’ve loved words and stories and writing my whole life—publishing a book has been a really, really big dream for a very long time. Now, right in front of me, the dream is coming true.
So VERY cool.
(As for my written-in-broccoli murder-mystery? Maybe in some alternate universe, it totally exists.)
photo credit: Allan Lau
Helena Fox 