QWrite and Tommy Schnurmacher

I just emailed my first submission by my new laptop. It is very exciting to be pulled into the computer age. As far as I am concerned my laptop is just a typewriter that emails. Some of you of the younger set may never have even seen a typewriter, or a dial phone for that matter, with a cord. I will now submit for you enjoyment my article for QWrite and don't forget to give a listen Friday am at 9, any station CJAD, CHOM and Mix 96.

How to Get Published Without Losing One’s Mind



I have been writing since grade six and composing, I suppose, since birth. Always highly charged, I careened from one romance, one husband and from one career to another. In 1985, I gave birth to an outwardly healthy, male child. He subsequently required a lobectomy, which removed most of a lung. I could not give him back and ask for a refund. His father began to melt away in drips and drops until I was alone with a toddler. I began a harrowing journey in the nether-world known as dating. I fixated upon one likely specimen and willed him to be mine. Somehow I became pregnant and had another boy. This one needed three open-heart surgeries, but the good doctors managed to complete the rerouting of his physiology in two operations. His cardiologist gave me hope. I began to believe that my baby would not die. At that point, I knew four things: I would write a book about my experiences, I would call it My Two Sons, I would dedicate it to his cardiologist and that it would start with the words, Even pigs sweat on a day like this.
I had been keeping a journal since before the birth of my first son. I now collected related medical files and began to write. It was really easy. Just type, type, type (or as Margaret Atwood says, scribble, scribble) and I soon had three chapters, about one hundred pages. I didn’t know if it was any good and the helium writer’s group that I attended every week had little to say except, ‘‘add some dialogue, you can’t write it that way.’’ Well I couldn’t write it any other way and when I conferred with my mentor, Judy, she told me that was my style, that’s how I write. When I first began pushing myself under her wing, I told her I was going to write a non-fiction book. She lovingly dissuaded me by suggesting I write a children’s book. The following week after writing Dan and His You-Know-What and presenting it to her, she acquiesced and allowed me my vision. I found a book about getting published and did every damn thing that author said and worked on a book proposal for months. I then bought a heavy volume of agent listings and began the queer querying process. I drove to Vermont to buy pink flowered American stamps to slap on my SASEs. I furiously wrote, licked, sealed, mailed and received for weeks. The receiving was rejection letters, though fortunately, most agents did not bother to respond so my rejection rate was not quite as painful as it could have been. My hide was beginning to thicken. The My Two Sons book proposal was squashed in a drawer and I wrote on. I wrote children’s stories – the under-twelve set (and some over-twelves) tell me that they are very good. I have a fine screenplay that has only been rejected a few times. I have countless short stories that make me laugh and I have a murder mystery fully plotted and partially clothed. I also have got quite a decent start to a novel about a woman trying not to have an affair; I’m still waiting to see how that one turns out. My Two Sons remained in the drawer and I vowed there it would stay until someone paid me to take it out. A dreamer you say?

Years later, I began bumping into a publisher on a regular basis. At parties, at the fair, there he would be. And I kept promising him a look at my book and I never sent it. I fell down some stairs and got quite banged up. Then three surgeries in two years that slowed me down and finally I just sent it. Book proposal in hand, he showed up at my house offering to publish. I spent a few months finishing my book and after handing it in early the editing began. Thanks to my editor, Stuart Woods, of Price-Patterson, it was relatively effortless and we published in November. Aside from some nasty clichés that he unwittingly tried to insert, he did a magnificent job. Since the release of the book I’ve been astoundingly busy. I’ve done five interviews for newspapers, several radio appearances and many talks. I want very much to get this book out to a wider audience, across Canada and eventually into the States and Europe; also to find a French editeur to translate and publish Me and My Two Sons.

My reward has not been monetary, (God no!) but in the responses from my readers. I have heard countless times how the book made them laugh and cry and that they could not put it down. Many read it in one sitting, often staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning. This is a book of hope that is giving people a sense of joy and inspiration, even when enduring the most difficult of circumstances. Having told my tale of having two sick babies, of losing one husband and finding another, in a humourous and poignant fashion, I am pleased that my audience finds that reading my book feels like a visit from an old and dear friend.

I love you all Karen