Me, AmazonEncore and The Miracle

Hello Anybody Out There

First, please bear with me.  This entire blogging thing, in fact this whole social interconnecting  is a monumental challenge to me.  I could be typing to myself, for all I know.  Okay, I’ll admit it.  I’m an older . . . make that a mature writer, and yes, I am the author of Page From a Tennessee Journal, the first of AmazonEncore‘s original manuscripts to be released.

It’s my hope  that someone other than these old eyes will see the story of how Page went from a family secret to the world stage.  Especially in the hands of a late-to-the game writer.

After I left my career in pediatric occupational therapy, I decided to dabble in writing.  A cousin reminded me that I had always been the one to set down the family history for reunions.  I was the one who made sure  the photos in the family album were interwoven into  stories.

After I waved good-bye to the job (bidding farewell to the kids I treated was tough), I signed up for a correspondence writing class.  My late Buffalo soldier grandfather had always intrigued me.  Haitian-born of a pirate family (they’d scurried across the Atlantic from some island off the coast of north Africa), and settled in Montana, strong and silent grandpa posed one big mystery.

Since grandpa shared so little of his life, I filled in the gaps.  No one told me this was the secret of writing.  But my technique was atrocious.  I’d never heard of point of view.  Plotting?  What was that?  Dialogue and action: you mean character and action were supposed to match in the same paragraph?

My patient correspondence-school instructor plugged on, softening his horror at my lack of writing skills in the softest of tones.  At chapter six, just as I was about to move grandpa out of Port-au-Prince and onto that ship bound for America where the six-year old became a stow-away, another voice stormed into my head.

Let grandpa rest.  He was on the other side of the family anyway, said my grandmother.  Tell her story instead.  Never mind that she’d left this earth fifty years earlier.  She wanted her story and that of my two maternal grandfathers told.  What else could I do?  I put my father’s father on the shelf and went straight to Mama’s mama.  That was at the end of 2002.

I wrote the first draft of Page From a Tennessee Journal in four months.  Remember, this was the first real book I’d ever written, and no eyes other than my own had ever seen it.

I gathered my courage, discovered a small group of beginning writers headed by Teresa LeYung Ryan (author of Love Made of Heart), and decided to listen to her nurturing words.  I wasn’t a writer, and I had no right to participate in their discussions.  Teresa would not hear of it.  She coerced me into my first public reading of PAGE in March 2003.  That was it.  With her strong encouragement, I ventured to the next level.  The California Writers Club–Berkeley Branch and their spectacular critique group.

Of course back then, May 2003, I had no idea it was a spectacular Critique group.  I wasn’t as all sure what a critique group did.  Though I didn’t know it, Part 2 of my miracle was underway.  David Baker and Anne Fox were, and are,  marvelous supports for unschooled writers.  With their incredible patience and enthusiasm, I blindly stumbled into Step 3 of my Miracle Story.  I went to Maui.

Because I knew no better, I entered the Rupert Hughes Prose Writing contest at the 2003 Maui Writers Conference.  PAGE placed as a top ten finalist.  Then my Miracle hit a six-year stumbling block.

I’m not one for rejection letters.  They do terrible things to me.  From 2003 ’til 2007, PAGE received about seven rejections.  After each one, I’d put the manuscript back on the shelf and start another book.  I’ve completed five so far.  At the end of 2007, I decided this was silliness.  I had to gird my loins, so to speak.  Self-publishing was on my horizon, but first, I’d give all my books one more chance at traditional publishing.

I spent 2008 revising four of my five books including PAGE.  2009 was going to be “the year”.  If I had no publishing contract by December, I was going to self-publish.  In January 2009, I sent out the dreaded query letter for three of my books.  The fourth–my romance novel– already had a nibble and a publishing house was reviewing the full manuscript.  I decided to hold off on PAGE until it washed out of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest.  I entered it in February 2009.

Well, I think you can figure out what happened after that.  I submitted a 278-word pitch for PAGE to the contest–the best 278 words I’ve ever written.  I did not win.  I didn’t even make the quarter finals though I got two great reviews from the Amazon reviewers.  My disappointment was softened by the two contract offers I received in April for my romance novel from legitimate traditional publishers.  At last I had my foot in the Publishing Door!

But the best was yet to come.   At the end of May, I was contacted by AmazonEncore when that figurative finger waved in my direction, saying, “we want to talk to you.”  My Miracle has been completed.  Thank you, my amazing team at amazing Amazon.  Thank you most of all, grandma.