Perseverance Pays Off

By Linda L. Scisson

Author Deborah Howard spoke at our March meeting on Monday, the 17th, rather than the original scheduled date of March 11, 2014 (the 2nd Tuesday of the month) because of hazardous road conditions caused by ice and snow.

It was worth the wait.

For one thing, this lady knows a lot about another kind of delay: the delay in being published. Deborah said she literally wall-papered a wall in a room in her house with rejection slips she received upon first trying to get published. Yet through a lot of hard work and perseverance, her Wall of Rejection transformed into a Wall of Perseverance.

Her 2005 book Sunsets: Reflections for Life’s Final Journey is relevant to everyone, because death touches everyone’s life. As a certified Hospice and Palliative Nurse, Deborah writes what she knows about.  Sunsets is a composite of different patients with a fictional character introducing each chapter.

Deborah’s book Where is God in All of This?: Finding God’s Purpose in Our Suffering (2009) is like a first cousin to Sunsets. It dives into a question many of us ask ourselves at one season or another.

Another book by Deborah is much shorter; it’s only four chapters in length. The title is: HELP! Someone I Love Has Cancer (2010). And HELP! Someone I Love Has Alzheimer’s (2012) also comes in a compact size.

And we look forward to the release later this year of HELP! I’m So Lonely. While Deborah shared that she has never been plagued with loneliness, she interviewed a lot of people who have.

Besides nursing and writing, Deborah (Mrs. Theron) Howard divides her time with editing, ghost writing, and lecturing. She mentioned a book that she ghost-wrote and emphasized the importance of being like-minded with the author. But she was not an unseen ghost, as Deborah’s name appears on the book’s front cover: It’s Not Fair! Finding Hope When Times Are Tough by Wayne A. Mack with Deborah Howard (published in 2008).

Deborah gave us advice on getting published. First and foremost, we are to read and keep reading. Writers love to read; that’s a given.

Secondly, buy an updated edition of Writer’s Market. Check the submission guidelines carefully. Use the editor’s name in your correspondence, rather than simply writing “Dear Editor.”

Third: Enter writing contests. Fourth: Attend writers’ conferences and ghost-writing conferences, as Deborah specified some of the “How To’s” one learns at these conferences.

Her final points of advice were to get an agent, and to keep marketing your own books, as generally a publishing company markets their authors’ books for only the first six months, and that’s it.

Hopefully, with Deborah’s appearance at our writers’ club, she will see an increase in sales of her books, as they are worth our time to read. And whether we look up from our reading and see snow and ice or Bradford pears and forsythia, let’s keep reading and writing.