Back to the main story…
So there I was with a bankrupt publisher, unemployed, and forced to move because my rental home had been sold out from under us. God was good to us, though. We found a better home in short order and I found new employment without missing any paychecks.
But what about the publisher situation? I’d signed a contract. Was it still binding? Was my novel tied up in that publisher’s bankruptcy proceedings? I hadn’t received a copy of the executed contract back or my agreed upon advance. So was I free to sell that book again or not? I didn’t have any answers and I didn’t know for sure where to find them.
I didn’t write that fall. I was busy settling into a new home and a new job. I had two completed manuscripts, the second a sequel to the first, and I didn’t know what to do with them. And, of course, it’s tough being a single parent to a teenager and a pre-teen. Activities multiply with every year. Thankfully, my widowed mom was around to help with chauffeuring duties (but she had a job too).
Fast forward to February 1983. One day I came home from work and there was a letter awaiting me. It had been forwarded from the address where I’d lived in January 1982 to the address I’d moved to in May 1982 to this address where I’d moved in September 1982. It was a self-addressed envelope, like the ones I’d mailed with my manuscript the previous spring. I assumed it was a very tardy rejection so I wasn’t nervous about opening it, the way I had been a year earlier when those envelopes arrived in my mailbox. I opened the envelope, read the letter inside, and burst into tears. My mom and daughters were asking, “What’s wrong? What is it?”
Nothing was wrong. It was an offer from the publisher who had acquired the assets of the bankrupt company. They were offering to publish my novel. On Wings of a Song had another chance at seeing print.
Would wonders never cease?!?
