A case for perseverance: announcing my debut novel

There is a motto in journalism that goes like this: don’t bury the lead. With that in mind I’m going to give you the lead right now. The headline reads like this: JOHN PRATHER IS SOON TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR!

Now I’ll tell you the moral of the post: this is a story about perseverance.

I’ve loved writing since I was a child. I’ve always been fascinated by stories. I love to tell stories and I love to listen to great story tellers.

My grandfather was a great story-teller and I used to sit and listen to him tell stories for hours. He could tell the same story over and over and still somehow make it fascinating to hear. I probably got my love of telling stories from him.

I also like to write. I have notebooks filled with handwritten stories from when I was a younger. They are all terrible, but I keep them just to remind me of how many hours I’ve spent writing.

One of my bucket list goals has always been to write a book. Through the years I have collected many unfinished manuscripts that were started but never quite brought to completion. I have an unfinished GoT style allegory about knights and kings and dragons that I started when I was in a wheelchair. It’s handwritten in a notebook and tucked away somewhere. I also have a third of a story called Hero about a guy with special powers who foils a terrorist plot. That one is saved on my computer. I wrote it one summer while visiting my grandparents. I have one about twin brothers who wind up with radically different lives. I have one about aliens. There’s a wild west one…

Like I said, I have several stories in various stages of being finished.

Then in 2013 I decided I was going to finish a manuscript. I decided I didn’t want to be one of those people who always talks about writing a book but never really does. So I put “write a book” on my list of goals for the year. I knew it might never get published but I decided I was going to finish an entire manuscript, beginning to end. And I did. It took a full year to complete but it showed me I could finish a manuscript. It wasn’t great. And it probably isn’t publishable. But it inspired me to move on from my goal of writing a book to my goal of getting one published.

In 2014 I had an idea for another story. Once I have an idea for a story in my mind, it won’t leave me alone. It rattles around my head like a ping-pong ball. So I started writing the new idea down as a short story, just to get the idea out of my head and onto paper. But the story just kept coming, so I kept writing.

Hours and hour and hours of being locked in my room writing and just over six months later, I had another completed manuscript. And this one seemed publishable.

I’ll make a long story short by saying that after three years of rejection letters and being turned down, after reworking my story over and over, after almost giving up and moving on to the next idea…I finally found a publisher who wanted to publish my book!

The rest is history (to be shared another time).

So this is my official announcement: My debut novel will be available in bookstores later this year!

I’ll share more about the process (and the book) in a later post, but for now I’ll leave you with a quote usually attributed to Thomas Edison: “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Perseverance –