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After rejections, a book publishing deal

Mandy Mikulencak’s new novel to be published next fall
Durango author Mandy Mikulencak’s young adult novel, Facing Fire, will be published next year by Albert Whitman & Co.

One thing Durango writer Mandy Mikulencak has learned since she set out to be a novelist in 2009 is that the world of publishing is teeming with rejections.

When she queried the first novel she wrote, she said, she was stunned by the speed with which she racked up 80 rejections. Her second and third novels also were met with those ego-deflating letters.

So she was discouraged, but not defeated, when she wrote her fourth book, a young-adult novel based in Durango about a homeless teen named Arlie who is forced to navigate the pitfalls of teenage years, all while hiding from the man responsible for the fire that scarred her face.

This time, Mikulencak said, she had learned a thing or two about how to approach the publishing world, and she felt more confident than ever about the book. She employed more patience, deliberation and care, making sure it was just so before querying it.

And still, she received 40 rejections.

But along the way, she also scored an agent. And one day, after several months, two revisions and a lot of fine-tuning, she got what is known as “the call.”

Mikulencak has sold Facing Fire to publisher Albert Whitman & Co. The deal was announced in July; the book is due to be released in September of 2015.

Mikulencak, who admits to being a “weepy mess” when she saw the listing of the sale in writing, said she was gratified but also a little disbelieving of the news.

“Really the overriding feeling is just that it’s surreal,” she said. “It’s been quite a journey.”

Facing Fire is a first-person story of 16-year-old Arlie, a girl whose face was disfigured when she was burned in a meth-lab explosion as a child. After her mother dies when she is a teenager, she is forced to navigate the halls of high school as well as life on the streets. To add complexity to her life, Arlie is trying to evade her stepfather, a meth addict who caused the fire.

Mikulencak, a former journalist who works as a communications specialist for Goodwill Industries International, decided to try her hand at creative writing after taking an intensive writing retreat in 2009. She had always had stories pinging around in her head, she said; she just had never done anything with them.

She didn’t originally set out to be a young-adult author. But she was blown away when she read The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson four years ago, and that led her to an eye-opening exploration of the genre.

“It was gritty and dark and wonderful,” she said. “There’s so much crossover appeal in the young adult market. There are all these amazing writers emerging.”

Inspired by what she saw as a growing market, Mikulencak started working on Facing Fire. After a “pantser” (short for seat-of-the-pants) writing style, Mikulencak let the story unfold as she penned the novel, creating a dark story but also one of hope and redemption.

Along with doing research on burn victims and local landmarks, Mikulencak came up with the voice of Arlie, getting into the head of the teenager and picturing life from her perspective.

She wrote Facing Fire in her spare time over the course of about a year, finishing in February 2013. But the work was far from over.

As with her three other novels, Mikulencak decided to take the traditional path to publication – braving the tough odds even in a time when many contemporary writers are opting to self-publish.

She admits that it’s a road filled with rejection, the industry’s fickleness and a lot of work, but she was willing to gamble on it because of the substantial benefits it promised: the marketing might and distribution power that comes with an agent and publisher.

“You have this whole team of people who can get the book in bookstores and market it,” she said.

Mikulencak will be working on revisions to Facing Fire this fall, then her team will start developing a marketing plan, cover design and book launch.

Mikulencak has made it through the roller coaster, and she’s about to get on it for another ride. She’s currently working on her next book, a novel about a female prison cook in the 1950s who is obsessed with preparing last meals for death-row inmates.

kklingsporn@durangoherald.com



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