I often like to joke about how publishing moves in geologic time.  That may feel like the case sometimes but the reality is that the time it takes to get a completed manuscript represented, contracted for publication, and then actually released usually pales in comparison to the time it takes to get from book idea to rough draft, through whatever numbers of rewrites are needed, to a final draft that's really ready for the eyes of agents and publishers in the first place.

What's frustrating for writers is that the process is so seldom a liner one.  As editors and manuscript consultants, part of our is to streamline the creative process and help writers avoid false starts,  blind allies, and getting painted into some corner you can't get out of.  But we cannot, in our effort to do this, discourage some trial and error along the way and the value of experimenting with an approach that  may or may not ultimately work for the manuscript in question. If I've learned anything in my 15 years of helping good manuscripts become good books, it's that there's no single right way to do anything. There are  lots of valuable principles to help editors give sound advice and writers make good decisions, sure, but sometimes you just have to try something and see the result on the page and then maybe try something else.

Which brings me to a writer named John, a plane named Betty, and a process of nearly ten years  that for me demonstrates what's so amazing about what writers go through in the effort to learn and refine their craft and then bring something really worthwhile to market.  I don't yet know the story's ending, but we've got a lot of good people here doing our best to make sure it's a happy one.  And meanwhile, I'm hoping that the story of this story might be of interest to anyone needing commiseration or inspiration on the long and winding road to getting a first novel published.