Although I’m sure that my family will have “Awesome Wife, Mother, Sister, and Daughter” engraven on my tombstone, the verdict is still out whether or not I will be worthy to have “Beloved LDS Author” included. But I’ve made a step toward that (hopefully distant) goal of mine and at the beginning of the month had a novel published — Miracle of the Christmas Star.
Since I’d like to interest you in reading it and getting to know the characters I have come to love, I’d like to share the story of how the book came to be, which turned out to be quite an interesting experience with responding to revelation and inspiration.
I have published three LDS novels in the past, but none so remarkable that anyone but my mother would remember them. For the past few years, however, I have had two unrelated thoughts in my rolling around in my mind:
- Since I have a daughter with cerebral palsy, I have always been amazed by the healings of Jesus and wondered at the faith the families of the people He healed had. The story of the people who lowered their crippled family member or friend down on a pallet through a roof to get him into the house where Christ was preaching especially has touched me. Being handicapped back then must have been even more miserable than being handicapped today. In my heart I have always believed that if Dawn and I had lived during the time of Christ I would willingly have crawled with her on my back if need be as far as possible to take her to the Savior to be healed. So there was that thought.
- Then I have wanted to write a short, inspirational book that I could sell at Christmastime, much like the Christmasy book, The Modern Magi, by Carol Lynn Pearson I had read a few years back.
But those two ideas didn’t meet until one night about three years ago in my monthly writers group. I had been reading sections of my book I had written that had already been rejected by one of my previous publishing companies because the sales of my last book hadn’t been spectacular. So I was rather discouraged about that.
One night I was getting ready to go to that night’s meeting and decided to just quit and give up trying to publish another novel because it’s just too hard. But then I thought about the parable of the unwise steward and thought that since I had been given a talent of writing, however meager it seemed to be, I needed to do all I could to magnify that gift. So I got in my car to head for my meeting, grumbling and praying the whole way. “Ok, I’m going, but what good will it do? I’ll never be a successful writer like Anita Stansfield or Gerald Lund.”
A while later while sitting on the couch at my meeting and contemplating my desire to be a “beloved” writer, I glanced up to my left and saw what appeared what I can only describe as a visible shaft of inspiration coming down and landing on me. It filled my mind and heart with idea to write a short book (like Carol Lynn Pearson’s) about just such a mother as I hoped I would have been if Dawn and I had lived in Biblical times (my projection of myself into the healings of Jesus).
I knew then what my story was. I started writing it the next day, hoping to impress the Lord by my immediate reaction to inspiration.
I had planned for it to be only about 100 pages long and to write it quickly. It turned about to be a longer story, about 176 pages, and took longer than I thought to write, about a year and a half, as I recall, since I could devote only an hour or two a day to its writing. Then I quickly sent it off to Deseret Book, expecting my miracle of publication to happen quickly because after all, I had been inspired and I had acted upon it. It seemed simple to me since I figured I had obeyed the principle upon which the blessing of publication was predicated upon.
Well, it was rejected quickly and then I wondered what I was supposed to do. I knew I had had that revelation and was supposed to write it, and I thought I had done a good job, so I picked it up and tried to figure out how to write it better. A couple of good readers in my family read the manuscript, made some good suggestions, so I made those changes, cleaned it up and fasted and prayed for direction. Then I kept on doing the only thing I knew to do — reading and writing it over and over while awaiting further inspiration.
I decided to find an agent since the book was in the genre of Christian historical fiction, not necessarily LDS, so the field of publishers was considerable larger than my previous novels.
And a complicated one the process was. I first had to identify only those agents that considered religious manuscripts and then tailor each query to what they wanted. From some of them that required about six pages of text (synopses, abstracts, bios, marketing ideas) to be emailed off, only to get a terse email back the next morning that the agent wasn’t interested.
So I decided to send it to Shadow Mountain, Deseret Book’s general market imprint, and pretend that the book hadn’t already been rejected by Deseret more than a year before. I was thrilled a few weeks later to get a personal rejection letter from them! I even read it out loud to my writers group since you only get personal letters when your work is potentially publishable. The editor writing said they had seriously considered publishing my book and it had been the subject of many discussions, but in the end they were sorry but they couldn’t publish every good book that came across their desks.
After that the thought of sending it to my previous publishing company came bubbling up in my mind, but I kept pushing it back because of my previous rejection. But the thought kept coming back, and I began to think that maybe it was inspiration. So I prayed and asked and basically told the Lord, “OK, I’ll send it to them, but I don’t think anything will come of it, but maybe it is inspiration and this is what You had in mind from the beginning, but I don’t believe it is.” (I suppose the Lord recognizes parenthetically prayed statements.)
I got it ready to mail — they required a full hard-copy manuscript — and wrote what I hoped was a persuasive cover letter, telling them I realized my last book for them hadn’t sold well, but I thought this one would sell better since it was suited for the general Christian market, I wrote a popular local newspaper column, and wrote a monthly column for Meridian. They must have believed me, and liked my book, because an editor emailed me that they wanted to purchase it!
I almost missed the email, though.
I was going through my emails the day after my exhausting day-and-into-the-night work trip to Washington, D.
C., five hours away on a motion-sickening bus, and it was pretty buried. When I saw the email address my heart sank, figuring it was a rejection email, but then I saw it had an attachment and a glimmer of hope appeared. I was so nervous I could hardly click on the email. Then I read “Congratulations! We at Cedar Fort would like to publish your book …” I jumped up and ran downstairs to where my husband was and started shouting, “I sold my book, I sold my book.”
Then I worried I had misread the email and made David come back up and read it to make sure. Then I was so nervous I could hardly text and call everyone. But I did!
Now my book with the beautiful cover is out, and I hope lots and lots of people will read it. Granted it will be nice to make so much money that I can pay off the mortgage and retire, but I also want people to know the story of Sariah, a mother who loves her daughter, Hannah, and is willing to sacrifice everything she has to find the Savior who will heal her.
The story is not only a metaphor of my life with my handicapped daughter but also a testimony of my faith in the divinity and healing power of the Savior, however long you have to wait for that healing to occur. As an added bonus to me, the whole process was a revelation in itself on how inspiration works.
To learn about “Miracle of the Christmas Star” and read sample pages, go to miracleofthechristmasstar.com.
