By the end of March, I plan to publish my novel, Hope in a Time of Dying. This book is very long in coming and below is the process I have gone through for more years than I want to admit. I will keep you tuned in as we determine the publication date, and where you can find the book.

This book started not as a novel but as a memoir. It still starts as I originally conceived it, sitting in the upstairs foyer of our two-story Victorian in the small Texas town where I was living with my family just before my life changed forever. All of that is true. I wrote that memoir long-hand and it spanned over 450 pages when it was all typed up. It covered the whole story of my family’s relocation to Los Angeles from rural Texas back in the mid-90s to help my next oldest brother Jim as he battled AIDS, a death sentence diagnosis at that time. Except there were these drugs, protease inhibitors, in clinical trials and some lucky people were winning the lottery – yes, a literal lottery – to see if those drugs might actually work. It was too early to tell, but there was at least some hope.

There had been no hope when my oldest brother John was diagnosed in 1988 and died only two years later from a disease that turned a whole generation of healthy young men into walking corpses in a shockingly short time. John’s acceptance of his fate reflected his newfound abstinence from alcohol and his almost evangelical embrace of AA. He was actively participating in his recovery program when he was diagnosed and the 12-step tenets and community served him well as he walked through his dying process one step at a time. He had the benefit of his closest friend right there with him – our brother, Jim – and with Jim’s help and the “program,” John went from healthy and happy to cadaverous and peaceful, providing an almost picture-perfect example of someone dying with dignity.

Jim’s battle with AIDS was more like hand-to-hand combat. He surely planned to move through his dying process with the same grace as John, but other parts of his life were not in the order that John’s had been. Jim had secrets he was keeping that contributed to his already naturally erratic behavior, and I was apparently the last person he wanted to share those secrets with. Plus, he had men in his life who were facing their own demons, and they created a push-pull situation for him that would have been hard to cope with even for the healthiest of people. This was the situation I walked into with my husband and three children in 1994 when we came to Los Angeles to help Jim, who made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse given our current life situation.

What happened after we arrived was the hardest year and a half of my life as I watched my brother continually. struggle and finally decide to stop taking the protease inhibitors he had won in that lottery. He was weak, pencil-thin, and defeated by the constant fight he was waging with debilitating illness and people in his life who had been difficult even when healthy and were near-impossible once they caught a whiff of dying. Jim made the active choice to take himself off all his medications besides painkillers and remove his feeding tube. It took ten long days for his already frail body to succumb.

After writing the first long draft of my memoir and whittling it down to a more respectable 375 pages, I sent it off to several agents. They were initially very interested until they saw that this was a complicated story that involved not only the devastation of AIDS, but also addiction, greed, untruths, and manipulation. At that point, the agents pulled away. Where was the market to sell this story? Still driven, I spent two weeks alone in a Motel 6 in Ventura, reworking the book, when I experienced a moment of clarity that centered not on publication but on my healing. What if my brother had done just one thing differently in his life choices? How might that have affected his outcome? I wrote furiously, diving into the world of fiction, and wrote what I wished Jim would have done rather than what he did. In this story, he still faltered multiple times, was manipulated by those around him, and faced his own battle with sobriety, but he made one healthy choice that moved his life back onto a positive path.

The book I will publish is my choice to delve into that fictional world. While some characters are inspired by real people, they soon take on a life of their own, becoming an amalgam of individuals I have either known, read about, or dreamed up. Also, the situations are not factual. Some are inspired by real events but then have been twisted and turned into completely fictional scenes. However, the life lesson I learned from my experience remains intact: Love and truth are the foundational building blocks for emotional healing.

I workshopped my newly fictionalized manuscript in John Rechy’s MasterClass (an experience of a lifetime) and resubmitted it. But while several agents admired the writing, they still turned it down. Again, no real market for this story. Disappointed, I put my manuscript away in a drawer and began referring to it as a first book, a learning opportunity. I then shifted to a second, third, and fourth novel attempt. But something stood in my way. I hadn’t gone the distance to publication with my first book and that lack of completion stood like a fallen tree across my psyche. Each book I started was abandoned after I hit a major obstacle, over and over and over. I shifted to short fiction and nonfiction and had publication success with these, but that manuscript lying fallow in my desk drawer seemed to grow in size and breadth and cast a shadow over all my novel-writing efforts. Years passed.

This past year, after reading The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield and Sean Coyne, I understood that I had allowed fear (what Pressfield calls resistance) to thwart my writing progress. I then realized that I had the power to remove that fallen tree myself. I could form my own publishing company and send this book into the world, for better or worse. That is what I have chosen to do, and I will now go back to my other unfinished novels, assess them with new eyes, and decide which one I will tackle next.

Here’s to writing, taking chances, and pushing oneself to completion. One step at a time. That is one lesson I learned through my experience with my beloved brothers, John and Jim, and my own exposure to the 12-step program. In addition, I am slowly beginning to trust the process.

I appreciate the opportunity to share my efforts with you, dear reader. Thank you for your ongoing support of my writing, and I wish you well as you walk through your own life challenges, writing and otherwise.

My best to you all.