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We're excited to welcome Mary Elizabeth Summer to the blog today. Mary's Trust Me, I'm Trouble released yesterday, and is the sequel to her 2014 debut Trust Me, I'm Lying. Today, she's giving a pep talk to publishing hopefuls.

How to Get Published by Mary Elizabeth Summer

Passing the Torch

Mary Elizabeth Summer is a Portland, Oregon-based writer who spends her days writing training materials for various companies and her nights racing pell-mell across the keyboard after her rampaging imagination. She writes novel-length stories with occasional forays into shorter fiction, and she writes for young adults, except for when she doesn't. She has a BA in creative writing (she BSes everything else), and she haunts bookstores for fun. Her current writing project is a young adult novel about a girl on the grift. Non-writing interests include volunteering at a horse-therapy program for autistic children and learning the fine art of parenting from her newborn daughter.

interview by Marcia Peterson

WOW: Congratulations on placing as one of the Runners Up in our Spring 2010 competition! What inspired you to enter the contest?

Mary Elizabeth: Thank you! I was very honored to be chosen from among such talented writers. Actually, I was inspired to enter the contest when I read that I could receive a critique of my entry. I didn't expect to actually place in the contest. I was happily surprised when I did, but also happy to get a professional opinion about the story.

WOW: Glad your expectations were exceeded! Can you tell us what encouraged the idea behind your story, "Of Crepes and Constancy?"

Mary Elizabeth: It's kind of a funny story. My writing group decided to try a variation of the exquisite corpse exercise in which each of us put two sentences into a hat and then draw two sentences out. One sentence was to be used as the first sentence of a story, and the second sentence was meant to be the last sentence of the story. The first sentence I drew was "How many times can you burn a crepe before it really does mean something?" In my original version of the story, I managed to end it with the second sentence, but in the revision process, I had to cut it, because it didn't quite work. As for the substance of the piece, at the time I wrote it, I was noticing a pattern in the relationships of people around me--a certain sort of insincerity that led to mind games and dissatisfaction. I had actually meant it to be a comical story, but it didn't turn out that way. Funny how characters sometimes take a story and run in completely the opposite direction with it.

WOW: For writers who may be interested in what you do for a living, could you describe what it’s like writing training materials for various companies?

Mary Elizabeth: It can be challenging at times. I have to take a bunch of information about something I know absolutely nothing about and shape it in a way that makes sense to someone else who knows nothing about it so that they learn. It involves a lot of adult learning theory and subject matter experts and ridiculous budget constraints and unrealistic turn-around times and blah blah blah corporate blah. It is a pretty sweet job, though. I essentially get to write for a living, which is the golden apple, right?

WOW: It sounds like a demanding but interesting job. How do you switch gears to write fiction at