The first day--I'm now a blogger

So, after spending almost an hour writing my first blog, I pushed the wrong button and erased it all. I'm an idiot.

After more than ten years, I am one step closer to being a published writer. I printed off twelve copies of my book and sent them to some of my friends after they agreed to read my story and get the manuscript back to me in a timely manner.

The editing actually began in March. Anxious for my wife, Lynnette, to finally see what I had been spending all my free time doing, I printed her a copy to read on our long drive to Disneyland over spring break with the kids. She read it and made a lot of notes and I spent a couple of weeks working on corrections before I printed five copies and gave them to family and friends to read.

One friend had experience with editing and I soon began receiving feedback that scared me. The manuscript was still much rougher than I wanted to admit. I was sensative and probably unresonably so, but she was thorough and insightful and brutally honest. When I got her copy back, I set it aside for a couple of weeks, wondering if I would ever return to it. As I thought about it, I realized how right she was and I took the majority of her critique to heart.

That began in May. Six months later, I finally finished, just last night. There is little doubt that I probably still have a zillion hours of editing ahead of me, but it is much smoother and cleaner and more meaningful. Tomorrow, I will have Lynnette help me with some of the content of this blog. I have a lot of things to say. I hope some of it will be worth reading. If I can find a way, I hope to post the first chapter of the book as well as a few other things, but as today was a stepping stone in a postive direction, I wanted to post this and say it has begun. Much more will follow. Ben