The journey to write Hope in a Time of Dying began a few years after my brothers, John and Jim, died of AIDS in the 1990s. I started it as a memoir to chronicle my experience when Jim offered me a job in Los Angeles, and my husband and three daughters moved from North Central Texas to Beverly Hills. My first effort was a handwritten first draft, which was pure memoir, with a middle section that covered my father’s family’s experience in little Bonham, Texas, as one of the founding families of Fannin County.

The result was a 450-page typewritten manuscript that contained pretty much every thought I’d ever even considered thinking. I hadn’t been writing long, and this effort was Herculaean for me. When I printed that first draft and mailed it to an agent who had expressed interest, I could have just as easily been mailing off my firstborn. I felt so tender and in love. When I received a terse note from said agent with the words, “Trim the fat,” I was utterly taken aback. I’d made our agreed-upon deadline and had written my heart out, and now he was talking about fat? What exactly was that?

When I think back on that time, I have to smile. Twenty years have passed, and that initial draft went from a fat 125,000 words to a lean 70,000. Also, during one of my major rewrites, when I was holed up in a Motel 6 in Ventura for two weeks alone, the book shifted from memoir to fiction. That moment came when I asked, “What if this had happened instead of that?” and off I went. From there, the book was work-shopped at my private writing group and then in John Rechy’s Master Class, which lasted for five solid years.

Shortly after finishing what I thought was the final draft, I resubmitted to agents and received a resounding “No thanks” from all of them. Where would they market a story about a sister and brother’s volatile but fiercely loyal relationship during the AIDS epidemic? With that, the book went into my desk drawer for a very long time, periodically brought back out for a quick read to see if I’d made a big mistake shifting from memoir to fiction. After each re-reading, I was sure I’d done the right thing going with fiction since the story could deal with more universal themes. But back it went in the drawer, time after time. After all, the agents and publishers had said they couldn’t market such a book.

That brings us to last year when I read Robert Pressfield’s book, The War of Art. The gist of Pressfield’s book is that the greater resistance one has to a creative project, the more important that project is to its creator. I heard that message loud and clear and pulled my manuscript back out for one more reading. At that point, I decided to publish it independently since doing so removed the most significant obstacle I faced. With that decision, I went through the usual process of having beta readers give it a read, plus a few of my closest writing friends, and then a bona fide editor. The book I will be releasing significantly benefited from the feedback from all of these folks. It starts from a real situation: a woman and her family from rural Texas move to LA to help her brother with AIDS. From there, fiction kicks in and remains in full force until the end.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share more about my process, the story, the characters, and what I hope people will gain from reading Hope in a Time of Dying. The publishing part of this process is all new to me, but I am game. As a close friend of Ray’s and mine, Bud Watson, used to say, “What are you saving it for?”

Thank you, dear reader, for being part of this moment with me.