05/06/2022
Lynn Murphy Mark
A dream realized
Earlier this morning I finished reading a novel written by a friend of mine, who is a fellow Deaconess School of Nursing colleague. That means we have known each other for 52 years. She asked me to be an “early reader” for her book. I consider her willingness to share her work to be an honor. She asked me to do it because I am also an author – as she put it, the only real author she knows.
It take courage to turn your creation over to another person and to ask for their opinion. By the time you arrive at “The End”, you and your book are tightly bound together. Finishing a book feels like giving birth, minus the physical pain and the embarrassment of having your body fully exposed to perfect strangers. That’s not to say that the writing itself is not painful sometimes.
This much creative energy takes hours of time and self-reflection. There is the ever-present Critic who has taken up residence in your head, and who can sometimes be counted upon to throw doubt and judgment on every word and idea.
On the other hand, there are times when the words flow freely on to the paper, almost as if they are coming through you from another dimension altogether. When I talk to my friend later I want to hear from her how this felt to her. It’s almost scary sometimes to have the ability to spill words on to paper, not knowing exactly what is the source of such a burst of creativity.
In the Author’s Note, my friend says she had the beginnings of a subject to write about for a number of years. I also want to ask her when she decided she had the time and energy to devote to such an undertaking. She told me last year that she was writing a book. She commented on the amount of research she had to do on a variety of subjects in order to support the premise of the book. This is not a spoiler alert, but there is much good information about the medicinal use of botanicals, and a venture into elemental Chinese language.
She also uses her experience of nearly fifty years of being a nurse as she describes an illness that descends upon her main character. The book is not about nursing per se, but about the importance of holistic medicine and good bedside care. There is also an emphasis on the importance of faith in the face of a difficult diagnosis.
Now my friend has to decide how to publish this book herself. That is a whole other birthing experience. Those of us who are fledgling authors don’t have agents to promote the book to publishing houses, or to advocate for the widest distribution possible. Getting a manuscript ready to print is a daunting task. Everything from editing to formatting to page numbering to the printing press can be a challenge. (My co-author, Sheila, spent hours figuring all this out before our new book could become a reality!).
But my friend is willing to do the hard work that it takes to get a bound, printed edition into her hands. Hopefully it will get into the hands of many readers. She and I share a similar philosophy in that we both wrote our books in the hopes that whoever reads them gets something they need as a result. I believe that will be the case for my friend!