Critique winner and how I got my agent

The winner of the full MS critique offered by Tawdra Kandle is: Suzi!! Congratulations!

And now, I'm very excited and happy to announce that Tricia Lawrence of Erin Murphy Literary Agency is my agent!
Honestly, as I type this, part of me feels like I'm living in an alternate reality. I'll wake up tomorrow and realize it was a dream and I'm still querying. :)

Anyway,  huge thanks to Patrick, the mastermind of  QueryTracker and everyone who posts on the forums. Without QT, agent Ammi-Joan Paquette wouldn't have seen my query posted there for advice and she wouldn't have passed it on to Tricia. (EMLA is closed to queries except for referrals or conferences.) Read all the deets here.

Moral of the story: Post your query for critique. Enter contests - especially those over at Miss Snark's First Victim or Mother, Write, Repeat. Agents troll the Internet, people, and they're always hunting for gold.

A few of my statistics:

Started querying: Mid-October
Queries sent: 25 or so
Response rate: around 45 percent  
Stopped querying: beginning of Dec. with 10 fulls or partials out. I worried it would take too long to hear back from everyone if I got an offer.
Offer: Dec. 23 from another, wonderful agent.

Dec. 23 was when everyone went away for the holidays. The offering agent and I agreed to speak after the holidays, and then I gave the other agents another ten days to respond. Tricia emailed me, we talked the next day and I signed with her immediately.

Because when it's right, there's no point in waiting.

She's suggested some great revisions for SA, which I can't wait to tackle. And I'd love to introduce her to you...perhaps through a pitch contest or something else fun? Hmmm. *mental note to strong arm convince Tricia to play along*

For those of you wondering when this news will be your news, I'm sharing this post from one of my favorite blogs. I don't talk about my faith much here but today I must say this: God keeps His promises. Always. And not just to me.