Picture this scene. It’s a food court in the Houston airport, where we’re on a layover en route to Newark. My wife, Kate, is in line to buy us some Tex-Mex. It’s mid-morning, but five days in Cancun made it clear to us that Tex-Mex makes for an excellent brunch.
Suddenly, the big, heavy-set man next to her pipes up. “Is that wild man over there yours?” he asks in a thick Texas drawl.
Kate looks over to where I’m sitting with our daughter, Anna. We were quietly playing cards when she left us, but now I’m pumping my fists in the air, flailing about and barely containing the urge to jump up and down.
“Yeah, I think so,” she says, nonplussed. “I think he’s winning at Crazy Eights.”
It was, in the end, somewhat better than that. While going through Customs, I had received a phone call. Literary agent Sara Megibow, of the Nelson Literary Agency, left me a voice mail. She was offering to represent my novel.
My chances of seeing my book published had just gone from snowball’s-chance to quite reasonable. To commemorate this milestone, I bought a Houston mug from Starbucks.
Oh, yeah, by the way…I wrote a novel. More on that later.
, 
Michael J. Martinez 