Are you a writer?

Would you like to be?

I was a teacher before I became a writer, so it only seems fitting to share my (admittedly limited) knowledge of writing and publishing with you. At least I can tell you how the whole process worked for me. Check the sidebar for specific topics.

My path to publication...

Before I became a writer, I was a high school English teacher who always enjoyed writing but never. Found. The time. (Sound familiar?) So when I quit my job and set sail on what was supposed to be the most romantic honeymoon ever (two years across the Pacific on a very small boat), I began writing in earnest: journals, blogs, S.O.S. notes—and a novel of which I have 129 versions of the first paragraph. I quickly realized I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. And, being in the middle of the ocean, I had no access to writing classes, writing books, online resources, or, most important, a writing group. (Hint: writers need these.) So I decided to follow that old adage—write what you know; I wrote about our voyage for magazines and anthologies.

        I make this sound easy. It wasn’t. I got many rejections. But I kept writing, kept sending out my work from our boat’s high-pitched radio modem (dee-DEEDLEE-dee), and once we reached Hong Kong, I joined a writing group. Over time, I built that writerly thing called my platform, aka the ways in which one reaches an audience. And I discovered who my true audience was: smart, can-do women who were dealing with the same issues ashore that I was afloat—marriage, sex, ticking clocks, balance, self, love. Enter the idea for The Motion of the Ocean, a story of love and romance, culture and identity, set against the backdrop of sailing the world.

         So I wrote a nonfiction book proposal (hint: this is how you sell nonfiction), pitched my idea at several writers’ conferences (hint: this is how you avoid the dreaded slush pile), and found an agent (hint: this involved many more rejections). My lovely agent sold my book idea to a lovely editor at Simon & Schuster, who gave me seven months to write the dang thing. Yikes! I rallied the granny-nannies, went into my writer’s cave, and wrote a chapter a week, plus time for revision. I delivered the manuscript a month before my second daughter was due, and about a year later, The Motion of the Ocean was born. It’s now happily in its second printing.

My secret hope is that MOTO will inspire others to live big dreams, too.

Cheers,

Janna

*I’m back to working on that very novel now. Stay tuned.