The backroad of getting published--plot twists & blessings

Wow, more than 3 months since I've posted! Life intervened.... But for those of you who really read what I write, my apologies. And for you just coming into this arena, I guess the gap in time doesn't matter.

But so much has happened since I last posted on my Blessings Ledger book proposal-agent-getting published journey, so many (as someone said) "plot twists," that I am understanding the value of frequent posting. It's like writing about the past, once the details have faded from fresh to distilled: you may see the essence more clearly so you can write it, but the turn-by-turn details are less immediate. It's perhaps the difference between a novel that takes ten years to write (a frequent occurrence) and a newspaper. And that, in itself, may be one reason why I like to write, and help my clients write, books.

Nevertheless, there have been plot twists. I think they are intriguing in themselves, and also because they reveal the journey aspect of life in any and every dimension--how little life resembles a linear chart going from A to B, how much more like a backroad where you may get lost along the way but end up meeting some wonderful people you'd never have met. It reminds me of when my first husband and I, back in the early 1970s, took a cross-country trip from Connecticut to California and back (ending up in the San Francisco Bay Area when that trip was over), in a very hard-to-fix car, a Citroen. Our car had the habit of breaking down in very odd places enroute--not the big urban cities, but the small towns we would otherwise have just sped through. One such breakdown occurred in a small town in Nebraska--an exotic place to a New Yorker like me, at the time. While my ex-husband tinkered under the hood, I went swimming at a public pool within walking distance. While walking there, I met a young man I didn't know on the sidewalk, who smiled and said "Hello."

That in itself was, as we used to say then, mind-blowing.

When my ex couldn't fix the car on his own, we managed to find the only mechanic in the entire state of Nebraska who dealt with Citroens. He came out and towed us to his farm, and while he sat outside and expertly looked under the hood, my ex and I were invited inside to chat with his wife. Soon after, the mechanic came in, washed his hands in mid-job, and we all sat down to eat Nebraska steaks and corn. Later, since the car would need a part imported from the next town, we were invited to sleep in their trailer parked in their front yard (they had acres of land). Morning met us with gold sunshine and pancakes. And so on.

I didn't like the car breaking down, but had it not had that propensity, we would never have met those hospitable people, eaten their food, slept in their trailer, enjoyed their friendliness, and I would not have had that memory which remains intact today.

So what has this to do with my book-proposal journey? Well, bear with me, it does. Writing a book--especially writing a book from the deeper self--is hardly a linear business. It has to come from the depths of the person in whom it has taken root, and that process is more curved (like nature) than linear. Why I thought that the process of finding a publisher would be linear, I'm not sure; probably because those things that seem to be about the rules and conventions of the outer world, I tend to think I have to make myself do. And because they are not intuitive by themselves, I tend to cull information and try to "do it right"--before I let go of what I can't really support and just pray for a way that is mine.

This is what happened in my book-proposal journey, short story: I wrote the book proposal because I'd sent another, related book I'd written (The Portable Blessings Ledger) to an editor at a publishing house whom I had made a with years before. That editor passed my proposal on to the gift editor, Vanessa. Vanessa sent the proposal back in my SASE (stamped self-addressed envelope), but with many comments in the margins, indicating that she had actually read what I'd written. Many of the comments were quite favorable, even though the staff had passed on the book.

Disappointment happened, of course, but being in the book field in my own way, I decided to be professional about it all. So I wrote a thank you letter to Vanessa. She responded with an email of her own, thanking me for my professionalism. I think we emailed back one or more times. Then she surprised me by inviting me to send her the larger book on which the Portable Blessings Ledger was based--which is, of course, my long work-in-progress, The Blessings Ledger: A Journey to Find the Union of Money and Compassion. Somehow, she gleaned from my brief mention of that book that there might be something of interest to her company, there.

I have come to realize that a single person's encouragement is enough to get me started on a large and otherwise daunting project. So when one of my clients told me she planned to take a book-proposal-writing class, I realized that would be a good thing for me to do too. I signed up, and over 6 weeks or so, I was able to hone in on the focus of the book proposal enough to get an anchor down. I spent another several months completing the proposal. But because the teacher, Dianne Jacob, had offered to critique the proposal, she got to read mine. And she seemed to like the idea of what I was doing very much, said my writing was beautiful (who doesn't love to hear that?) and even suggested that I contact a friend of hers in Massachusetts who is an agent.

I contacted her friend. This agency was most appreciative of what I was doing with my book proposal, passed on it for various reasons, but was quite encouraging. Later, a woman who worked there, Jane Falla, wrote me again to say that my book had lingered in her mind and she believed in its worth.

I thanked her. She wrote back. I wrote back. She wrote back with warmth and generous suggestions. I kept signing my letters, "In gratitude," because it was true. One day I realized that in the midst of all this effort to do the game the way it was supposed to be played, a true blessing had happened: I had made a friend.

(To be continued)