Given the amount of difficulty I’ve had in my own writing career, in terms of breaking in with an established publisher, I decided a long time ago I would never encourage anyone else to take up writing. However, I violated that decision for Bessie. She is a retired lay missionary, along with her husband, to Papua New Guinea, with assignments also in Fiji and New Zealand. But let me start at the beginning.
Back in early 2011 I discovered other writers in our church. Some were seriously trying to publish, others were just toying with the idea. It looked like enough people to have a writing critique group. I discussed it with our pastor and volunteered to head it up. He said to go for it. We announced it in the church bulletin in March 2011, had a couple of brainstorming meetings in April, and began meeting in earnest every two weeks beginning in May 2011.
At one point we had eight or nine people on our mailing list. We had four or five who attended regularly, and eight who attended at one time or another. Bessie was one of the regulars, in fact the most frequent attender besides me as the leader.
She and her husband had their call to missions after the older two of their four children were already out of the house. They are laymen, so were unusual candidates for career missionaries. But God had a place for them. They did a few years of “apprentice-type” work with cultural missions situations in the States, then it was off to Papua New Guinea for seventeen years, and then a few more years at the other assignments. When the announcement about the writers group went out, Bessie told me she wanted to attend, because she wanted to record her missions stories for posterity.
She came to the organizational meetings and most of the regular sessions after that. I liked her writing style, which was pretty much how she talks. She didn’t understand some things, such as how to mix narrative and dialog, how dialog should be formatted, over-use of adjectives, adverbs, and passive voice, i.e. the typical things a rookie writer doesn’t automatically know or remember from school days English classes fifty years before. She wrote one of her missions stories, one that she had shared orally in church, and shared it with the critique group. Since the group included a couple of people who don’t attend our church, and some who hadn’t heard the story, most who read it (all except me, I guess) were seeing it with fresh eyes.
Bessie responded well to the critique. She made changes to the story and brought it back, till it was fairly well polished. Then she moved on to another story, and another. Over a year’s time she completed six or seven stories. One of the things I did as group leader was always ask everyone what their intentions were for any post they were sharing. Was it for a magazine? Part of a book? For publication? For family use, or for unknown use? Bessie said she really didn’t know, but that probably just for family use.
But, after about three stories, I realized these would make a great short book. Our denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, publishes six or seven missions books a year through the Nazarene Publishing House. Somewhere around 15,000 words each, these books are designed to inform the church about what is happening in their missions program, and to support that program with prayer, gifts, and other involvement. I could see that Bessie’s book would be about the right length (maybe 2,000 words longer), and would fill a unique gap. Most of these books, as with most of our missionaries, were written by or about ministerial or medical missionaries. Never had I seen one of these books about lay missionaries in a career position.
So, breaking my rule, I encouraged Bessie to begin thinking about how these stories would fit together for one of these denominational missions books. She said no, they were just lay missionaries, how would their book reach anyone, and similar words of unbelief. I said her book was interesting because they were lay missionaries and that our church needed to hear her and Bob’s story. Eventually I helped her to see that what I was saying was true. By this time she had written and shared five of her stories, with two more to go, including one about their retirement years.
Alas, the writing group didn’t make it. Slowly all members except Bessie and me were met by a series of reasons why they couldn’t continue. I folded the group in early September 2012. We really should have done it six months earlier, but the dream dies hard. Bessie and I, however, continued to meet. We would go to the Bentonville library two or three Wednesday evenings before a month, before Wednesday night service. Bob would browse while Bessie and I worked on her manuscript. In addition she e-mailed me her stories, which we now called chapters, and I printed and critiqued them.
She did all the manuscript typing, but didn’t really want to tackle the formatting, so I did that. We tried different arrangement of the chapters until we had it in the most logical order. Then I told her how unsolicited books normally get published through a publisher: query, proposal, then complete manuscript, but that most publishers would want a new author to have the manuscript complete before they turned in a query.
Round and round we went, Wednesday after Wednesday, polishing the manuscript, the proposal, and the query. Bessie had an ex-missionary friend who had written several of these books, to whom she sent the proposal for review and critique. Somehow we learned that we could probably forego the query process—or rather that we could actually submit the proposal with the query, given that from her time as a missionary Bessie knew the person who would head up the selection process. It was early January 2013 that both of us felt that everything was ready. The query was drafted as an e-mail with the proposal (including three sample chapters) attached. I told Bessie to push send.
But she wouldn’t. She said “You’re the one who pushed me into this. You push send.” That gave me a short pause. If I pushed send I had a degree of unintentional ownership in the query, proposal, and sample chapters. I read or skimmed them through again, looking for obvious errors and formatting problems. It looked perfect to me. I pushed send, and told Bessie she was sure to have this accepted for publication. It was a niche book submitted to a niche publisher giving a unique perspective that only she could write.
But the months wore on. Nothing. She saw the man she knew at our quadrennial general assembly, and it was as if she had never submitted it. I had given her typical times for expecting a response, and what to do if you didn’t get one, how to respectfully contact the publisher and ask what the status was. She did that once, and I don’t remember the response or if there was a response. We discussed it several times over last year. I thought it was about time for her to send another “what’s the status shall I look elsewhere” e-mails, but due to sickness, weather, and travel have missed her for several weeks.
Finally, today in my inbox was an e-mail from her. Except all she did was forward me an e-mail from the acquisitions editor she knew. She had sent him a second very respectful e-mail yesterday, and he responded something like, “Oh, didn’t you hear from us? We have your book scheduled as one of our 2015-2016 missions books.”
So there it is. The reluctant writer I mentored will be published. Before I will, at least as something other than self-published. Her success is, in a small way, my success. I wish her many sales and enough royalties to make it worthwhile. As the modern saying is, “You go girl!”
