How long does it take to write and publish a novel? People often ask me this question. Well, that depends, I tell them.

I’ll use O’Malley, The Mail-Order Dog as my example since it’s my latest release. I’ll do my best to recall details, but they are a bit blurry as the process has taken a while. Okay, here goes…

I wrote the first draft of O’Malley during the pandemic, somewhere between 2020 and 2021. The germ of the story came from all of the mail-order we were doing at the time, as well as the fact that we’d actually ordered a dog!

The novel is based on a true story, or on several true stories woven together. It’s also true that my son, like Kai in the story, spent a lot of time researching dogs to find which would best suit as a best pal. I think the first draft took me about three or four months. I loved it!

The story made me smile, chuckle, and out right laugh.

I was super-excited about the story once it was down on paper– err… rather, when it was down on my laptop. I was so excited, that I sent it out right away to my publisher at the time, Sharon Fitzhenry. She’d loved and published Summer North Coming. And guess what? She did actually *LOVE* the O’Malley story from the first time she read it. She excitedly called me to say so. Bingo, I thought. I’d done it again! It would be a hit. Wait, she said. First she’d need to get it past the board, also known as a panel of publishers she worked with from several publishing houses, all under one big publisher umbrella. I waited and waited some more. I waited about six months, so the total time was about one year at that point.

Eventually, Sharon emailed me to say that unfortunately, the board did not give O’Malley the go-ahead since they had another dog story being published that year, and they didn’t need a new story competing with it. Sad face.

Okay, I thought. If Sharon loved it, perhaps another publisher would feel the same way? I sent it out to five or six other pub. houses. Over the next year, I gradually heard back from most of them. Usually, I received a generic response. Other times, I’d receive a nice note. It all amounted to ziltch. Post-pandemic, I wondered what I could do to make the story more enticing, more exciting, and therefore more sale-able. I decided to add more about the dog’s journey to the boy, similar to Black Beauty where the horse has a series of experiences.

Now, in addition to a cute story, I had parts where I was literally weeping. Poor O’Malley! I made the poor guy go through some tough stuff. I thought it made for a much stronger story. The rewriting took me several months. I sent it back out to several publishers, but still they had no interest, or else they had other dog stories. Would I ever find O’Malley a home?

Fast foward two years, and I had an agent to whom I sent the story. She suggested that I add a section to the end, which I did. Next, we sat on it for two years while we worked on expanding and fine-tuning a different novel.

Once that YA novel had been sent out to many publishers, I enlisted the help of two editors, one at a time, to help me fix any problems they found in the story. That took about a year. During this time, we found a sable Sheltie friend for O’Malley, and we ‘mail-ordered’ a second dog, a relative of O’Malley, who we named Clay.

Finally, I decided to send the story out to a new publisher I’d discovered in my home province. Her name is Alice. Alice cares about publishing books which “…build faith and family.” Bingo! My book had a teeny bit of faith and a huge dallop of family! It took her just a few weeks to get back to me and tell me that she loved it! She had a few suggestions on how to improve it, and after I fixed things up, she edited it with a fine-toothed baby comb to find any little or massive errors.

It has been roughly five years since I’d written the first draft. This fall, autumn 2025, it was ready to publish. Yeah! Smiley face.

I originally wrote the story for all the children I’d met while visiting schools with my picture book, Summer North Coming, and my first novel, Escape from the Wildfire. They’d ask what I was working on next, and I told them it was a ‘dog’ story. Well, they were all super excited to read a dog story, so “Voila!” Just like that I am able to offer them one. Easy-peasy. I couldn’t be more pleased!