Second draft

After two-plus months of squeezing in any of my extra time to the project, I've finished revising my manuscript. Today Lessons with Love: A Collection of Hometown Teaching Tales will go into a mailing box, bound for Reno, Nevada. Once again, the folks who help make the decisions at the University of Nevada Press will give it a lookover and decide if they want to accept it for publication.

Among the changes, I've added an introduction called "Teacher Prep." Its purpose is to give the stories a better focus. In my two past books and with other humorous collections by Patrick F. McManus and Jean Shepherd, I haven't seen this as essential.

Instead, the stories appear as separate units, to be enjoyed at one's leisure and in any order the reader chooses. In Pocket Girdles, readers had a choice. They could follow a chronological organization, or they could select a chapter in the middle of the book and still enjoy others later.

This revised manuscript of my 33-year teaching career now features a loosely chronological order to the stories. Again, however, I believe readers can still pick and choose titles they want to read first or last without losing a sense of the book as a whole.

My focus as an author has always been to tell a good story and to entertain my audience. I like to put out a book that does not restrict readers, one that can be picked up and enjoyed while sitting in an airport, relaxing before bed time, or spicing up one's life on a boring winter day.

My teaching career was entertaining at times, frustrating at times, and extremely meaningful at times. I'm hoping this collection reflects each of those dimensions. I'm also hoping that a broad audience, ranging from teachers to students to all former students, will see the book as a realistic portrayal of the experiences an educator encounters while spending all that time with teenagers. Finally, I hope the stories do reflect a representative cross section of the students we meet during our career and the ends to which they'll go, either knowingly or unwittingly, to leave an imprint in our lives.

The University of Nevada sets high standards for the books it publishes. If I can meet those standards with this second draft and with subsequent editing, I'll be thrilled beyond belief. Acceptance from an academic press would take me one step closer to calling myself an author and knowing that it really means something.

So, off it goes. I'm ready to accept rejection. I think I can do that a lot better than I could 15 years ago. It's never easy to swallow, but with enough practice, one learns to bounce back. I figure I've had enough practice, and I doubt that I'll do like Stephen King did with his first book and throw it in the garbage can.

Instead, I'll lick my wounds and keep moving on, offering the manuscript until someone decides to publish the book. Thankfully, in the publishing quest, there's always a Plan B, C, D, etc. With luck and work, Lessons with Love may hit stores in 2006.

For now, I'll wait and hope for positive vibes and a note or call, saying, "You're in."