Being greatly harassed by this obstacle...

Oh how I love thee, Charlotte.

From her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights.

This bringing out of our little book was hard work. As was to be expected, neither we nor our poems were at all wanted...

The great puzzle lay in the difficulty of getting answers of any kind from the publishers to whom we applied. Being greatly harassed by this obstacle, I ventured to apply to the Mssrs Chambers, of Edinburgh, for a word of advice...

Ill-success failed to crush us: the mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued...

These MSS. were perseveringly obtruded upon various publishers for the space of a year and a half...

...there came a letter, which he [Currer Bell] opened in the dreary expectation of finding two hard hopeless lines...and, instead, he took out of the envelope a letter of two pages. He read it trembling. It declined, indeed, to publish that tale, for business reasons, but it discussed its merits and demerits so courteously, so considerately, in a spirit so rational, with a discrimination so enlightened, that this very refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly-expressed acceptance would have done...

Obsession

My latest obsession is the Avon FanLit contest. The "American Idol" of romance writing keeps me up into the wee hours voting and reading the forums. I may even post a chapter, even though I don't write Regency. If your chapter makes it into the top ten for that round, it gets read by Eloisa James, Teresa Medeiros and Julia Quinn. Exalted company, indeed.