Good or bad, right or wrong, I tend to do things my way…… Don’t we all.

As I was saying, last Tuesday, I started sending  out query letters. I sent out queries for about a year, all the time trying to get better at my new found craft.

I was contacted by a publisher who was interested in my work. Yippee! as we all say. I started working with publisher and things were looking good until they asked me to change a very significant element of the story. Not a rather significant element, but a very significant element. For anyone who has read the story you may be able to guess, but let’s just say, (so as to not spoil it for those of you with it on your TBR list) it would have changed the whole outcome of the intended result. It would have changed the way the Teressa and Rory got together.

I wanted to be published, but not at the expense of writing a story I didn’t want to read. There were plenty of those kinds of book already being published. I wanted to write the book I wanted to read and this was it.

So as hard as it was, I said thank you so much for your time and consideration, but I need to respectfully decline the request to kill my baby.

At that same moment, and I do mean that same moment, I got a call from Balboa Press saying they would publish my story. And I didn’t need to change a thing. (Well, a few things, like it needed some more copy editing, which it got, and it still has errors, but then again so do I!!)  How could I refuse?I didn’t.

It was a long process, longer than I had expected, but the book finally came out in June of 2011. How grand.

Has it been everything I expected? No, not really, but as I say; Reality is rarely the way we imagine it.

Has it been fun and exciting? OH Yes. It’s been grand.

Am I making a ton of money? NO. But, I’ve been vastly rewarded. My paycheck comes every time someone reads my book and tells me they liked it, that they enjoyed reading it and are looking forward to reading the next one.

Am I blessed? Oh yes.  Life is good and I am blessed.

Enjoy always, T