It’s a long, twisting road to publishing—don’t let anyone tell you differently. There is no one path and results are as varied as the methods to get there.
My journey started as a simple quest to get my story on paper. When I was a second lieutenant in the Air Force stationed in Missouri as a missile launch officer, I had a stalker. I would delight at the reactions of my audience as I regaled them with the tale of the creepy things that can happen to a young female, working in a man’s career field, living alone, rebuilding a 100-year old house single-handedly. After the expected ohs and ahs, my listeners would in evidently insist that I write it down, some going as far as to assert that there should be a movie deal on the table.
As frightening as it was to live through at the time, my experiences don’t live up to Hollywood expectations and I realized this. To satisfy my friends and colleagues, I put pen to paper—or hands to keyboard, as it were, setting a self-imposed deadline at the end of 2010. Reading through the pages, where the ending was nothing more than a permanent change of duty assignment, I recognized that my life wasn’t exciting enough to share with the masses. But, adding a few murders, the storyline took on a life of its own.
Having never done this before, I reached the end of my draft manuscript and had no one to ask, “now what?”
One of my traits, sometimes positive and sometimes negative, is that I have little patience. I want to get things done and move on. The book was written, so I wanted to move on to the next stage—figuring out how to get it published. Where to start? There are plenty of books, blogs, and websites that will feed you bits and pieces, but as I alluded to at the beginning, there is no ONE way to get there.
Let’s walk this path together. Feel free to add in your own experiences along the way.