3 Ingredients to Getting Published: A Dream, Tough Skin, and a Message

I’ve had several people ask how Catching Dawn (my first book!) got published. It wasn’t easy. Agents and publishing companies want someone with a writing resume or an established platform. I didn’t have either. But, what I did have was a dream, tough skin, and a message. 

 I was a writer long before I had anything to write about. As a child, I wrote poetry, really bad poetry. The natural world was always my subject, and in Catching Dawn, you’ll find (probably too many) descriptions of nature. I’m sorry. I can’t help myself. I’m the freak you see saving worms from the pavement at the greenway or jumping two feet to avoid stepping on a caterpillar. I cried, for a good hour, when we cut down an old spruce tree in our front yard.  Full disclosure: I have been known to impale a tick with tweezers or burn one over an open flame, but I respect all other creatures. Okay, maybe not cockroaches. 

 At some point my writing evolved from poetry to short essays. Sometimes, I dabbled in fiction. Sometimes, I only wrote a sentence a day. But, I always wrote. Two unedited manuscripts sit on a hard drive somewhere that I might dig out again at some point. I just never put my work out there. I never sent it to magazines or journals or anywhere. For one thing, I didn’t depend on writing to make a living. But, also nothing I wrote felt urgent. It didn’t feel necessary.

In the end, I simply wasn’t brave enough. I didn’t think I was a good enough writer to sit on a shelf with the likes of Peter Zheutlin or Julie Barton. To be honest, my writing might have remained in the inner workings of my laptop if I hadn’t volunteered for a nonprofit in the rural south. That changed everything.

When I started working in animal rescue, I found all the motivation I needed to expose my life and my writing, which is not easy for me, someone so private that I border on being a hermit. But…finally, I had something to say and a reason to say it. One of my best buds, a former race car driver, told me, “Grow a pair, would you?” So that’s exactly what I did. I grew a pair.

 It took me two years to write Catching Dawn, mainly because I have four mutts and a full-time job. Both get a lot of my attention. But, it also took that long because some of the material was so emotional that I could only create in chunks. The chapter “Worst Thing Imaginable” is by far the least edited chapter in the book. It took every ounce of courage I had to write those scenes. And I don’t think I’ll ever read them again. Not ever. Just like rescuing Dawn will always be my greatest accomplishment, losing Miss Annie will always be the worst thing imaginable. 

For two years after I finished my manuscript, I got rejected. And rejected. And rejected.  And I get it. In the literary world, I rank about as high as a mosquito at a writing retreat. In the best-case scenario, I was a long shot, and in the worst a nuisance. Most of the time, people never even bothered rejecting me. They just never sent a response. After six months, I would assume their silence meant no, scratch another name off my list, and move on. 

 But, I never gave up. I once heard a screenplay writer talk about his first break. He compared it to walking along a wall and wanting to get to the other side but not being able to find a door. He just kept walking until he found one. That pretty much sums up the last two years of my life. I just kept going. And I kept going because I believe in Catching Dawn. I believe in its message, which is that dogs are magic and have the power to heal some pretty beat-down and battered hearts. I also believe this book validates a dog’s emotional complexity. Once we (as a culture) recognize their magic, once we acknowledge their intelligence, then maybe, just maybe we can make a change.