When I read the word “perseverance,” it’s in a self-conscious Jane Eyre type of voice, but that tongue-in-cheek delivery doesn’t really do justice to the concept.  All of the plucky heroines and authors of The Heroine’s Bookshelf have one thing in common:  they’re not easily swayed by fate’s slings, arrows, and twists in plot.  I’ve done my best to emulate them…but damn, it’s been difficult.

No, I’m not comparing the road to publication to the bitter moors or the rocky terrain of a broken heart.  But it has its own bumps.

I won’t bore you with all of the gory details on how an earlier, different incarnation of this book made it onto publishers’ desks and into editorial meetings…and died in marketing.  Repeatedly.

I’ll decline to elaborate on three years spent wringing my hands over the prospect of never having earned my trusty agent a cent and my seeming inability to come up with anything saleable.

I will gloss over the many years of false starts, trunked novels, and sore wrists.

I’ll simply throw out the truism I’ve come to after several years of ass-in-chair, I’m-doing-this-professionally “discipline” (punctuated with much gnashing of teeth and ripping of paper):  Publication, slow and ponderous and mysterious as it is, is the fun part.  But you can’t publish until you’ve edited, ruthlessly.  And you can’t even get that gutsy thrill until you’ve written, pitifully and in your socks and ratty headband, just you and the headphones and the blank screen, willing something out of your fingertips so that the editing and the publishing can happen.

If it sounds like I’m revving myself up for the work of actually writing the book, it’s because I am.  Accompanied, of course, by some of my best friends:  Louis May Alcott, Charlotte Brontë, Betty Smith.