Elaine Isaak doesn’t have the problem of being easily intimidated. She sent her first novel to the folks at Del Ray (who rejected it) and after an unfinished second try, she sent an excerpt from her third novel, “The Singer’s Crown,” to the leading editor in the fantasy publishing market, David Hartwell at Tor Books.

When he didn’t respond for a year, she didn’t get too flustered. She just kept writing. When he e-mailed and asked to read the whole book based on her three-chapter submittal, it seemed to prove her effort was worth it.

Then two years passed. Isaak waited. She got pregnant, had a baby. She moved her business studio two times and wrote four other books. And even when he finally called to say “yes,” there was still more waiting. “I got an agent, based on his offer,” Isaak says. “The agent felt that we could do better on some aspects of the deal, and the offer ended up being withdrawn. I almost died.”

But then her agent found a better home for “Singer’s Crown” at a smaller publisher in the fantasy market, Eos books (part of HarperCollins), and on Oct. 11, almost eight years after she began writing it, the book hit shelves across the country. “I had expected it to feel more like an end than a beginning, but instead, it’s more like the doorway to the next level. It’s sort of like selling admission tickets to your dreams.”

Isaak began writing stories at the tender age of three, making up situations for herself and her friends. In high school she gravitated toward narrative poetry and kept writing while she got interested in soft sculpture, briefly pursuing it during her college years but finding the courses too limiting. Instead she worked for a local company creating costumes and eventually started her own business, Curious Characters (www.curiouscharacters.com), which she still runs.

In the meantime she published poetry in a number of journals, released two chapbooks and started a writing group in Amherst, where she tested out new poetry and short stories. After attending the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 1997, she focused her writing on longer work. What she thought was a short story actually turned into “The Singer’s Crown.”

“Most of my short fiction is still close to 10,000 words,” she admits. And her novels don’t skimp on length either. “I have another series, a set of five closely linked books set in England just before the plague, with a secret underworld of witchcraft, called ‘The Barber’s Battle.’” Not to mention the sequel to “Singer’s Crown,” called “The Eunuch’s Heir,” that’s due out next year, and a third book “The Bastard Queen” that’s still on the editor’s desk. Prolific much? “I also have a contemporary romance set against the fishing industry collapse in Gloucester,” she offered.

Though her worlds seem varied and hectic—mother, wife, small business owner, sculptor, writer—there’s a pattern. She relishes how the creative process for all of her work starts with an empty white space that she gets to fill and sculpt into form. Inspired by Jim Henson, Ray Bradbury, Tad Williams, Maurice Sendak, and J.R.R. Tolkein, among others, she finds joy in creating a cohesive whole. “It must feel as if there are bones and muscles, and a beating heart—whether they are clad in faux fur, or in paragraphs. I find that I am more inspired, more ready to take on the words, after I have wrestled with real materials for a while.”

Being a poet also informs how she writes fiction. “I think a lot about how individual words sound, how they add up to make phrases, and how they act upon the page. I try to build my sentences, paragraphs and chapters the same way I built stanzas, using the white space to create a gasp of excitement or the captured breath of suspense.” This shows in the pacing, structure and eloquence of “The Singer’s Crown.” Isaak pulls no punches in her writing. The main character becomes a eunuch in the first chapter of this book, and the hero’s nephew and brother die in the opening paragraphs of “The Barber’s Battle.” The tagline for her Web site is, “You do not want to be my hero.” She’s got that right.

With enough material for her own section at Barnes and Noble, a good agent and the gumption to track down even the highest caliber editors, her career looks pretty promising from here. “This is the culmination of years of work, but at the same time I hope it’s only the beginning of a new life,” Isaak says.

Elaine Isaak
reads from “The Singer’s Crown”
Friday, Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. 
at Barnes & Noble, Newington
603-422-7733
Visit www.elaineisaak.com for details and upcoming readings.