Manuscript Rejected – Just Prods me for More Determination

The hardest thing about writing is not getting the words down on paper (or in ROM). It's getting people to read it afterward. One needs to be creative when telling the story but it takes an awesome amount of salesmanship to get the story out.

That's easy for the famous ones. In fact, most of them don't even write the book they're selling. Check it out. How many big-shots have co-authors? The ones who did all the research and the actual editing and revising”

For the rest of us, it's a matter of trying to sell ourselves through a process called querying – sending out letters to pitch the story to literary agents and/or publishers. And it takes a lot of research to find one of them who might be interested.

So, I'm going to share with you my latest attempt to sell SONORA SYMPHONY, A Warrior’s Wounds Healed by American Indian Medicine. After the usual stuff of a business letter, here's the spiel:

Staff Sergeant Ray Daniels awakens from nothingness. He feels the aches and pains of his physical injuries healing. But not the mental ones. Even the bravest mind cowers and entombs memories when confronted with unbearable horrors. Ray's memories only crawl out during his weakest hours, and when they do, they drag him awake, covered in cold sweat and shaking from unheard screams.

He doesn't know who he is, where he's from, and whether he has a family. All he knows is that the doctors told him he was injured in Afghanistan. Unlike the other patients, no one visits him. No family. No friends. He is alone.

Frustrated, he leaves the hospital to find himself in a truck stop outside of South Tuscon, Arizona. He's noticed by an ex-Green Beret veteran of the Vietnam War. Joe Redmond recognizes the blankness in the young soldier's eyes. He's an elder of the Tohono O'odham Tribe and takes Ray in, seeking to heal him using traditional know-how.

SONORA SYMPHONY is a contemporary novel of 109,000 words that approaches PTSD from a unique perspective. Ray's immersed in nature, given healthful and healing foods, and has his dark thoughts diverted with tales and lore of American Indians. All takes place in the Sonora Desert of southern Arizona.

Ray takes part in an ancient ritual on Baboquivari, the sacred mountain. It leads to a fork in his life's road. One leads to the World Above and the other to his future.