Now I will tell you about editors I hired, and how I found them. Please keep in mind that all the while I was full of doubt as to whether I should tell this story because it is so personal. However, like Dianne said, I had to continue to heed the urgings from within to get the story told. After I had collected vignettes, poems, memory fragments, and phrases and put them into the computer, I started word processing. I actually taught myself the word processing program by using a cassette tutorial. What fun! I love word processing! For discipline, I would tell myself that I would spend (for example) 4 hours putting paragraphs where they belonged. I would move a paragraph that was at the end of the text to the beginning, and vice versa, when appropriate, to get the some context of chronological order. Sometimes I got very confused, other times the movement made sense. But I spent hours and days moving sentences and paragraphs around. This was difficult, since the book just begins and reports to the reader in flash-backs. The suggestion to begin at the suicide attempt came from the counselor Karen, who told me, “Your story begins with you lying flat on your back in the hospital. That’s your rock bottom.” So I kept the questions in mind: How did I get there, and WHY. After months of word processing and grammar and spell checks, I found a freelance editor.

My husband and I sporadically attended Unity Church in Overland Park, KS. One Sunday, the church sponsored an event honoring authors who belonged to that church. There were 4, and after service the authors were selling/signing books. One of the authors was a poet named Wyatt Townley. She’d been on the platform that Sunday morning, telling the congregation not to “be afraid” of poetry. Overland Park was not exactly an “artsy” community. Well, I decided to buy her book of poetry, and at her setting was a brochure for editing services provided by the husband/wife Townley team. I took that little pamphlet home and sat on it for weeks. Finally, I inquired as to prices (@$1,000) and this was my first big step in letting the book leave my hands. After hemming and hawing for another couple of weeks, I delivered a manuscript to the Townleys. Since I was new to this process, and had been “ripped off” in various ways previously in life, I asked if I could pay half at delivery and the other half at pick up. Townley agreed and told me there was a two-week turn-around time. He delivered on his promise, and I got an education on editing that was worth every penny we paid.