Submitting For Publication

 When I sit down to write a book, I do not say,"I am going to produce a work of art". I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.

George Orwell

Mostly I write for the same reason Orwell does.  I want others to "see" what I see in regards to an injustice I witnessed or was a part of, a truth of some kind I realized, and believe others will benefit from realizing or just to share something beautiful. 

I wrote a book that did all that...I believe, anyway. 

I finally, after 6-7 years of playing around with, putting away for "other things", ignoring, editing, revising, scrapping, and rewriting... sent out a sample of the book I wrote for my sister.  This book was so challenging but was so demanding to be written.  I struggled partially because it will never be good enough It represents something so precious to me...my time with my sister. ...and how do you capture that and do it justice?  I knew though that I had to send it out...at least a sample of it to begin to let go of that energy somehow.  So I submitted to one publisher and will not submit elsewhere for three months. I had this feeling of "Wow!" when I pressed the submit button.  I have never struggled over anything else I have written like I struggled with this.  It was so personal maybe...so real... yet it probably won't seem real to people who read it.  Truth is often stranger than fiction.  I did whip it into a fiction piece...(based on real-life events) ..but is so full of my memory of life with my sister it floats on truth. 

It's done. I celebrated it being done with a half-glass of wine that has been on my counter for a month now. Getting to this point of writing this book, after pouring my heart into it, twisting and turning over it for as long as I did deserves some type of celebration.  Of course, if it does get considered, and the editor wants to see the full manuscript,  I will have to go back to the rest of it and make it as perfect as I can. So I am not quite "done"  the work yet...but the story is down and it is being released, at least in part.   That is something. 

All is well!