First-Time Author Gets Six-Figure Deal

And she probably deserves it.

The pitch intrigued the publishing world: "Forrest Gump wins Powerball."
And with that, Patricia Wood's new novel, Lottery, was launched into a bidding war that nabbed the first-time writer a six-figure deal.

And for more inspiration there's this:

She had written three earlier novels and has "a stack of rejection letters" to show for them. Lottery came to her quickly last year. She spent eight hours a day, seven days a week for three months writing it, she says. "I was consumed."

She sent e-queries to agents, hoping to attract interest.

"Most of the time I'm so busy, I don't read the e-mail queries," says Dorian Karchmar, a literary agent with William Morris in New York. But on a slow day last summer, she read Wood's and was hooked by the Gump line and five manuscript pages Wood included.

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