I got my first “yes” this morning. When people say getting published is hard, they aren’t kidding.

If you’d told me 4 years ago when I started writing that this was how I’d get my first opportunity to be published, I would have laughed. I’m still laughing, actually.

After some time and a fair amount of rejection, I set my “book book” aside and wrote my collection of nonfiction essays at the suggestion of an editor I’d met. She and I had been working together on the essays when my mother had her fall and my focus shifted to her recovery.

During this time, I decided to blow the dust off a paranormal romance I’d written and had hoped to publish as an e-book several years ago. I whipped it into shape and submitted it. My plan was to earn enough with the e-book to go back and finish editing my essay collection with my expensive-but-well-worth-every-penny editor, which would in-turn help me get an agent and finally get my book book published.

I’m starting to feel like the old woman in the nursery rhyme who swallowed a fly and then swallowed a spider to catch the fly, and then swallowed a bird to catch the spider, and then swallowed an e-book to finance the essay book, and then published the essay book to get a contract to publish her original fly. Well, maybe that’s not exactly how it goes, but you get the picture.

When I was featured in an article in The New York Post 3 years ago about writing a book as the ex of a famous person, I was told by a veteran in the publishing business that literary agents would be fighting over me. Instead, I heard crickets. Ironically, the e-publisher who offered me a contract today knows me by a pen name and anonymous fiction I’ve posted online, and is unaware of my former life in Hollywood as a model who dated a comedian who became a household name.

I never expected to follow a path to publishing in such a back-asswards way, but that’s life, isn’t it? I still have no idea what’s next, but today I got a yes—my first yes since I swallowed a fly. I can’t wait to see what’s next.