A Historic Moment. . . . in my life anyway. Just finished putting page numbers and running the spell check on my book mansuscript, The Search for the Madonna. And---drum roll please--I just sent it on to the publisher. Hope she likes the revisions I've made.

One thing I'm finding with selling a book is that it's more a group effort than the result of one person writing. Almost three years ago, I had the idea for a children's mystery. I'd always wanted to set a book in one of my favorite periods of history, the Great Depression of the 1930's.
I wanted a book where the main character, Maggie, could collect and scrapbook articles and pictures of the Dionne Quintuplets. (One of my hobbies use to be collecting Quint memoribila and I still love anything to do with multiples from twins on up.) I also wanted a book that would use some tidbits of family history--my German Brandenburg connection and that would feature twins.

Didn't take me long to make a choice about what kind of book I'd write. For someone who still owns every Nancy Drew book she ever read, it was an obvious decision. MYSTERY. There had to be a treasure, a long undiscovered mystery from the past and a farm. I started writing the book in a hotel room in Dearborn, Michigan and finished on a borrowed laptop on my sister's kitchen table. Then the real work began. . . .I had to rewrite it. Again and again and again.

Two friends, Erica and Kathi, went over it with their red, cyber pencils. They corrected, suggeted and gave me ideas to make it a better book. My editor also had ideas. Back to the laptop. More rewrites. More corrections. I burned disks and passed it around. More ideas. More input. Is it finished? Time will tell.

Right this moment, it just feels good to have sent it. Now, back to the mundane ----we are still searching for "A Pup Named Scooby Doo," although we did find the missing duck. Which is another story for another day.