THE BOOK

In the past few months I wrote my first book, What a Husband Needs from His Wife, which will be published by Harvest House Publishers July 1, 2006. I want to write the story of how this book came about for a couple of reasons. First, it's so fun for me to remember. And secondly, I hope it encourages other writers "out there."

Like most writers, I have always loved reading and writing, and I truly cannot remember a time when those two things were not a part of my life. My second time around in college I majored in English education, became a high school English teacher, taught for ten years, and then quit when I had my second child.

Being a stay-at-home mom was always what I wanted to be, so I just enjoyed that for a while. But after a while I couldn't stay away from what is a part of me - teaching and writing. So I started writing small articles, devotional types, about the subjects I was growing in, just things God was teaching me, challenging me in.

My first published article came out in the Proverbs 31 magazine in 2001 on a topic that challenges me: marriage. It was simply about some of the issues in my marriage that I was trying to work on and improve, with God's strength. After that I had a few more articles published over the years, the last of which was last November, again in P31 Woman magazine, called "Becoming Your Husband's Helper."

This was the article that caught the attention of Harvest House Publishers. They called Lysa TerKeurst, asking if she knew how to get ahold of me, having no idea we live down the road from each other! She called me to see if it was okay to give them my phone number - like I was going to say no! - we did a little screaming with excitement. And that was that. Nothing for two weeks. Of course I thought about it every day, and just tried to say to God, whatever happens, happens.

Finally they called and asked if I would be interested in submitting a book proposal on the same topic of the article. Of course, I said yes, and then began the work! I started writing the proposal in March, gave myself six weeks to complete it and turned it into them in May of 2005. Then I waited...

I had never written a book proposal, so let me tell you a little bit about that, in case you're a novice writer like me and want to know more about that. Each publisher has his own guidelines about what to include in a proposal, but generally the proposal consists of the following: 2- 3 chapters of the proposed book. These can be any chapters, not necessarily the first chronologically. Next is an outline of the book. Then biographical information and some marketing info. I gave myself a self-imposed deadline of six weeks to submit the proposal simply because I had none of this written. Perhaps if you already have a considerable portion written, you could submit a proposal in a much shorter time frame.

I'll continue later...