So I was on my way home from Iraq and I figured I’d go ahead and throw the manuscript into a contest. I mean, the book had gotten me an agent and it was in waaay worse shape then than it is now. What the hell, it couldn’t hurt, right?

Wrong.

Well, I just got those contest entries back today and, well, I got hammered. Badly. Like beaten soundly around the head neck and shoulders with a blunt object beaten. Which, of course, has me wondering what the hell is going on.

So, between the contest comments and the agent comments, I’ve got a problem, right?

You betcha.

Now what?

Well, I could sit in a corner and lick my wounds, whining about how everyone is being mean to me and it’s really a gem if only the right person would pick it up but I won’t. I’m also not inclined to dig into this manuscript right now, either. But I’m going to. I’m letting all these comments swirl around my brain and fester. I’ve got ideas of things I can change. Plot points, characters.

Basically, I’ve got my work cut out for me if I ever want to see this book in print.

I’ll be honest. I’m tired of the damn thing. I’ve been working on it for two years and I can’t tell you how many times I rewrote the thing in Iraq. So, the fatigue is an issue for me. I’m letting it sit for a while so that when I do finally dig back into it, I’ll be able to do so with a fresh perspective.

How do you take comments from contests? Do you send in to contests at all? Why or why not?

I know what it says at the beginning of the book. All the characters and events are purely fiction, blah, blah, blah.

As I was tweeting with an ex Navy friend the other day, we realized we both had the same problem:

Nobody believes the true stories and we have no choice but to fictionalize them!

Let me let you in on a little secret: I’ve met so many characters in my nineteen years (eight active duty and eleven as a military wife) that I just have to put some of them into books.

How can I not?

There was that corporal in the Royal Air Force, that Buck Sergeant from South Carolina, the good old boy from Virginia, the trust fund baby from Texas, the Fratalian from Maine, the farm boy from Kansas, the cowboy from South Dakota…and that’s just the first four years!

The fact is, we’ve met more characters than we can count – and likely had just as many adventures with those characters.

When we put the characters and adventures on the page with a plot, a few hooks and some tension, they make for great fiction but we can never share the truth.

My story “The Path to Freedom” was reviewed once by a reviewer who found only one aspect of the story completely unbelievable – the idea of a good looking woman getting a free drink from a Las Vegas bartender just to sit at the bar. The premise of the overweight cop being sent to a top secret CIA training camp in the Nevada desert wasn’t questionable at all. It was that free margarita that made the reviewer call “bulls***”.

They also had a bit of a problem with so many good looking guys in the story but I chalk that up to their never being posted on a fire team with three Air Force cops with good haircuts who run with forty plus pounds of gear and guns all day.

This is why I have to write fiction – nobody believes the truth.

Besides, who wouldn’t want to romance the characters I’ve met?