At last, Progress on the Road to Publication
My time has been consumed by my day job, travel, the power outage and now, my writing career. Not much time in the day for MySpace. Between some international work and traveling to New York, San Antonio and Williamsburg, my life has been a mess. Add to that the storm and power outage and chain saw and siding repair, well, you should get the picture.
Now here is the good news. At least very hopeful news. While I’m trying to be cautiously optimistic, I’ve been fairly giddy. 8 months ago I sent my manuscript to a small publisher I met at a Mystery Writers conference here in St. Louis. The editor in chief has been swamped but graciously took my bi-monthly calls and kept me up to date. The last call was to say that her intern read my manuscript and liked it and she would be getting to it soon. That was 1 1/2 months ago. Last week I received an email asking me to call her. I did with trepidation. It so happens I received the e-mail just before leaving for the San Antonio, Tx airport to return home. I had an hour to kill, so I thought I’d call.
She began by listing off all the good things about my story; the plot and premise, the dialog, the science behind it and the action scenes. I kept waiting for the hammer to fall. What she said was that I needed some tweaks to set scenery in places where I forged ahead with the plot and descriptions with minor characters that interact with my protagonists.
SO I asked her what this all meant. She said she wanted me to get my butt in gear and make the changes and re-submit it to her. Okay, I embellished that a bit. She did say if she didn’t want to see it again, she would have written me a rejection letter.
I’ll quote the last line of her follow-up letter; “I do think that this is going to be a great book when you have finished your edits, so don’t give up on it. If you’d like me to read it again and give further comments before you are finished, I’d be happy to do that also.”
I called her last night and she asked me to email the first five chapters that I had been busy incorporating her comments in.
I need prayers, crossed fingers, and whatever good luck i can muster.
