What does it mean to put your life into 53,000 words?

December 16th, 2006 sticks raw in my mind. I can’t remember if it’s the date we took possession of our home in Minnesota, or if it’s when I unloaded the truck halfway and slept on the empty, carpeted floor all day with my daughter as we waited for life to start here, or what.

But December 15th, 2011 will be forever-locked-in as the day I submitted my novel.

Many of you have encouraged me along my way of writing Highway Bleeding, the manuscript I’ve been working on for about a year and a half. For that I am thankful, especially to the few of you who have read it for me. I hit a point in my life where I needed to reflect or die, so I did-and I don’t know which one yet.

So my life-in-a-Word-document is flying through cyberspace to an independent publisher in the UK as I type this. In my mind’s eye I see the Great Brits print it out and pick it off the stack to be gleefully scrutinized, but ultimately exalted as the fresh work they’ve been looking for. In a way, I’m not guilty of writing the fabled “great American novel,” yet.

I will keep everyone posted on how the process goes, and in the meantime I hope to whip this site into the shape it should be to showcase the heart of the novel. Until then, thanks for all the “likes” and comments and support and I hope to someday soon announce here that you can buy it on Amazon or perhaps from some swanky cutting-edge publisher, directly. I literally poured my life into the pages and, you might ask, “Isn’t it weird to think of charging money for writing about life?” Yes. But when there is soul involved, somebody always has to pay.

The publisher indicates that writers get “bonus points” if they write their own blurb in the query, so, here it is:

“Highway Bleeding cuts open the part of all of us that wants the purity of youth to cleanse the pain of life, as Burt puts it, ‘so the blood can breathe.’”