When a book has a high-concept hook like "FORREST GUMP meets Powerball," it's going to go to auction and land a six-figure deal. And as USA Today's Ann Oldenburg discovers, that's pretty much what happened to Patricia Wood, who lives with her architect husband, Gordon Wood, on a 48-foot sailboat moored in Oahu. Another point common to these types of stories: Wood had written three previous novels with little to show for, but 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."

As was her literary agent, Dorian Karchmar, who read the manuscript last summer and after minor revisions, signed the author and submitted LOTTERY to publishers. "By 9 o'clock the next morning, I kid you not, there were already three messages on my voice-mail. All of them from wonderful editors." Karchmar adds, "It was immediately clear there was real heat around it," evident in the form of foreign rights sales to 10 countries and a possible movie deal. Wood's still taking it all in. "I never in a million years would have predicted where I would be now. But there's an inevitableness about it. There's this strange familiarity I am where I belong."