Writing a book, depending on how you look at it, can be one of the most rewarding things you can possibly accomplish in a lifetime. Then again, it can also be the most difficult and sometimes impossible thing you’d ever want to pursue, but once you’ve caught the writers bug, it’s difficult to let go.

I didn’t actually catch the bug until I was in my mid 30’s, but the last fifteen years has been a roller-coaster ride of research, stick-to-it-ness, and faith. Believing in yourself is probably going to be at the top of that list, along with a bazillion other things, within that faith category. If you can write something that makes sense and it’s something that someone else will enjoy reading, you’ve pretty much done your job. When I was working on the manuscript for my first book “Roodee: The River’s End”, my wife cried when she finished reading the first chapter. Wow,my words made someone cry. That made quite an impact on me. My writing actually gave way to someone else’s emotions other than my own. I must have done my job

After I finished that manuscript, and my wife and I read through it and made correction after correction, I began sending it off to publishers. Wasn’t that an eye opener! After numerous rejection letters I felt like a total failure. After a couple weeks of going through depression and a lot of self pity, I pursued another option…an editor. This was another eye opener, but one that I eventually was thankful for. My editor, pardon my language, beat the crap out my manuscript. She wrote page after page about my flaws as a writer: punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, and the list went on. But there was a section at the very end of all of this where she did have some positive comments: I have a great imagination, great story, great characters, etc. This helped, but I still had a lot of work to do if I was ever going to get my book published.

I rewrote the entire manuscript using her comments as a guideline. This was a long dragged out process, but well worth it as it served as a great lesson to me. This whole experience made me go back to the basics, back to basic-English to learn how to write correctly. I now have a whole collection of books on this very subject that I use all the time for reference material. An Editor is a must have in this business, because without one, you have no one to bounce your story off of to get the professional feedback and criticism you need. Editors aren’t cheap though, but they’re worth the money and the self satisfaction you’ll have that you’ve actually gone through a professional before presenting your material to a publisher.