[Forward]

My path to publication was as rocky as trying to do this post. For some reason, I haven't been receiving all the instruction emails that were sent to me.

I've written all my life. Short stories as a kid, most extremely similar to whatever I was reading. Plagiarism is what it's called, though I didn't know anything about such things at the time. During my teen years I wrote plays and even published a magazine and wrote all the stories in it.

While mothering my five children, I did the PTA newsletter and wrote plays for my Camp Fire Girls to perform-and I also tried my hand at writing novels. Not very good novels, but I was trying. I sent one in and it was rejected, I decided I probably didn't have what it takes, and threw the manuscript away-and one or two others as well. At this time I was reading lots of romances and the novels I wrote were mostly romantic.

My sister did our family genealogy. While reading it, I realized that there was more than one fascinating story in there. I started writing an historical family saga based on the genealogy. Of course doing this required lots of research. Research about the time periods the family lived in, what happened where they were living that caused them to move-because they moved constantly which was evident by where their children were born. I worked on that first book for a long, long time.

When I felt it was done, I started sending it off to publishers. This was back in the day of typewriters, carbon copies, and mailing the manuscript off to the publisher in a box with another box inside with enough postage to mail it back. Of course this process took a great deal of time-especially since I received one rejection after another. About every fifth time the manuscript bounced back to me, I rewrote all 500 plus pages-which of course meant typing the whole thing over again.

Also during this time my sister took chapters of the manuscript to a writing group where she lived (I couldn't find one in my town) and read them one by one. Because I wasn't there, they were not afraid to be critical-and sometimes brutal. Though it hurt, I learned a lot and made even more changes.

After nearly thirty rejections, and after a move to where I live now, instead of the returning manuscript in a box, I received a long business envelope from Dorchester Publishing with a contract in it. Wow! Was I thrilled. Also, was I ever dumb. I read the contract, signed it, and sent it back. Once I got the contract, that's when I should have looked for an agent. At this particular time, though I had finally found a writers' group
to belong to, none of them were published so I had no one to give me any advice. (Remember this was in the days before computers.)

Now that I'd found an editor who loved my writing and I was published, I figured my next book would be accepted by the publisher. But that wasn't what happened.