The Book

It was Memorial Day weekend last year when I first spoke to my friend/editor about the possibility of writing a book. Her company was hoping to publish a biographical collection of stories from the life of a past general authority, and the project excited and inspired me.

I remember sorting through all the possible subjects, and I still can't believe it took me so long to settle on Matthew Cowley. Hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.

Photo of a photo that I'm crossing my fingers we can get the rights to.
Wouldn't this make the best cover?

Here I am a year later, and my lifelong dream of writing a book has come true. The only question is whether it will be published, and I got word on that just last month.

(Sort of. Let me explain.)

I spent the better part of March and April compiling copies of my all my manuscript's sources into a binder. It sounds like a simple enough task, but my manuscript has 283 sources. 283! By the end of it, I swore up and down I was switching to fiction.

Every white tab is a different chapter, with a few sources in each.

I didn't want to mail the binder from Texas to Utah (can you imagine the postage?) so I made a point to deliver it to Covenant's offices before we left. It was difficult to do without a car, but fortunately my parents came to town for Ryan's graduation—and they had a car! Their support of this project knows no bounds. The morning just before Ryan's convocation ceremony, my mom and dad chauffeured me to Covenant like I was a 12-year-old again.

When I was finally sitting across the desk from my editor, I noticed she had my manuscript on her desk. It had notes on the title page. She told me she planned to send me an email later that very same day. Since I was there, though, she gave me the long and short of it in a good, old-fashioned face-to-face chat.

The answer is a bit complicated. For simplicity's sake, here is a direct quote from the email she sent later to recap our discussion:

"The committee was really interested in what you have written about Matthew Cowley. They liked the stories you told and the format. Before we extend an official acceptance, we would like to have you make a few revisions and take a look at those to see if we can more easily market the book. "The manuscript as it stands now is about 100 pages longer than we would like it to be. We would like you to cut it from 352 pages to 250 pages or fewer. ..."

I know what you're thinking. Cut 100 pages?! That's so much of your book! I bet you're so sad to hear that!

But I have to be honest: I was pretty excited. During the writing process, I found that my manuscript was going to be much shorter than Covenant's submission guidelines suggested. I didn't want to submit it too short, so I added peripheral information about Matthew's family members and elaborated on a few of the more dramatic stories. In short, I stretched it out. But stretching my material feels like diluting Lyla's apple juice: it goes further, but it's not nearly as good.

So now my job is to trim all the fat off my rather obese manscript. It will only make it better and I'm excited to turn in a lean, 100-percent-juice version of Matthew Cowley goodness to the publishers in a month or two.

When I joined my waiting parents in the car, I gave them the news like I'd just learned whether I made the basketball team. It was humbling to arrive at such an important meeting as a passenger in my parents' car, but it was probably fitting. My entire life, Dad has been my coach and Mom has been my cheerleader. And we celebrated the news like it was a victory. Because at least it wasn't a no.

There's still a lot of work ahead, but that's comforting to me. I've been feeling strange lately, like I won't know what to do with myself once I've finished this whole book process. Writing a book has been my dream since I was a child. What if it isn't accepted? What if it is? What do I do then?

Lyla inadvertently answered my question while she was watching her favorite movie on the iPad.

Now accepting new dreams.