This is my blog on publishing my book Suitcase Filled with Nails :Lessons Learned from Teaching Art in Kuwait.

It took six years to write the book.  Actually, it took six years of living the book before I sat down and actually started piecing my notes into a book. When I left Kuwait,  for good in June 2010 I had over 800 pages of copy and five dog-eared files of newspaper and magazine clippings.  I also had the goal of trying to condense all this material into a story of my six years in Kuwait teaching studio art to Muslim women and treading a misogynistic minefield.  The first draft was 600 pages long, mostly whinny rambling.

It took seven months of writing-writing on average six to eight hours a day-pecking out maybe 30 versions before I sent 300 pages to a copy editor.

In December 2010 I received a bill for $2000 and my manuscript sans most misspellings, inactive verbs and dangling participles. Suitcase was so ready, so timely, so unique, agents and publishers would snap it up-I was so sure.

 I spent the next two months, sending out queries to 135 agents and publishers.  My office was papered in 24”x24” sheets of printing paper, inked with the date of submission, to whom the query was sent to, when it was replied to (if I ever received a reply) and marked as to whether they wanted the first five, fifty or all the pages of my manuscript.   In orange ink I would mark their response.  Next to one agent’s name and because of her response I wrote in red ink - Paranoid, crack-head, narcissistic vole.

By February paper covered two walls of my office.  The requests for my book just about balanced the thanks we’re not interested rejections.  Still, none of the please send outline, proposal, sample chapter, pages, a urine test, your first born, ever produced a Yes, I’ll represent your manuscript.  Everyone had their reason.  Anyone reading this has probably heard them all.

That same February I went to the San Francisco Writer’s Conference to meet with some of the agents who had my manuscript.  I figured getting up close and personal might enhance my chances of representation.  After having met some of the agents who had my manuscript I walked away with one impression of an agent resembling a burrowing animal.

I also came away with the business cards of six new agents who wanted to see my manuscript.  After submitting Suitcase  and after waiting weeks and months, alas their responses agreed with the other 135 agents and publishers…good story, just not for us.

Back to the computer, and a new editor who reviewed Suitcase, advised on where the story arced and didn’t arc.   Back to the computer, re-write, re-write…  Another bill for editorial services $2500, back to the computer to write arcs…I am losing hope and my chiseled abs as they melt into blobs of inactivity over the waist band of my pants.  I am developing Dunlaps Disease… my stomach done laps over my pants.

I am also losing hope.  But, I have already said that.

I have a story.  It is good (I think).  It is timely.  It needs to be told.  And, it will be, because I quit fooling around and found an editor whose niche is Pacific Northwest authors, AuthorCloud, and it's my hope this will begin a productive and honest working relationship.  So far it has been.

The Cover of my New Book.  Look for it soon!!!!