Crawling along for seven months, re-writing every word and sentence, the breakthrough came. We needed to end the book, seven chapters before the end.

Lin , my editor and I moved the seven chapters into the next book, which worked for the beginning of the next book, lined it up with all the title page, copyright page, acknowledgement page, and dedication page.

That meant 7,000 words were all ready written for the next book, and we had seven chapters less to edit. The deadline date moved to a definite finish date. It was right for the book, right for me and right for my market coach, Mikey. He has been waiting in the wings, waiting to give me racing lessons in marketing and selling my first 2500 books. All is well.

The beginning of this book in February, 2011, started as a teaching book in the midst of the novel. NO, NO, NO. It can’t work that way, nobody wants to be taught. All the teaching material, along with scriptures and questions was moved to a companion workbook for another area of where I wanted the book to be marketed.

This breakthrough brought two more books, partially written, and making the one I am working on as a sleek racehorse, ready to put at the starting gate, and about ready to run the finest race it well ever run. The world is about to see a best seller and will wonder how an unknown outrageously self-published author could do it.

In March, I painted a quick watercolor of Mikey, my Market Coach. He didn’t like the pencil drawing I had pulled from a cartoon character I painted of him twenty years before.

Being Mikey, he had a painting drawn of him from Fiverr and put it on my website. When I saw it I came unglued. It was horrible. He looked like a terrorist smiling. The only thing missing was a bomb.

Well, it bombed out for me. I got busy. I am an artist, my site is a fine arts sight for my paintings. This orange, black lined drawing with this terrorist with long hair appearing on my beautiful site perplexed me to take action. I tried to be tactful to Mike, but I wasn’t. I’ve got to get rid of it. It’s horrible.

I told him, send me some photos of you. I immediately painted three watercolors, and put one up on my site. All of this to say, I decided to paint  watercolor images of my characters for my book, Spirit of the Red Candle, a journal of Mary Magdalene. 

 I started playing around, I found images of who I wanted my characters to look like. I knew in the beginning how I saw Mary Magdalene. The painting, which is my book cover was my inspiration to write the book in the first place. I wasn’t going to take time to paint them in oil. I needed every minute to finish my book, but watercolors are fast.

I painted all the characters. Then I thought, I should put them in the book before the chapters that introduce them. This was the beginning of showcasing my art in the book.

If you remember in the introduction to this project, I was sick and tired of my art, done that, been there, and ain’t going back. This opened a door for me to bring my art forward with my writing.

Walking through the tenth re-write introduced my paintings to the book. Sometimes it is good to wait on honoring the project and allowing it to take its own life.

Every step is the first step of a successful, satisfying journey. Call this journey my life as a self-published author. Call it Outrageously Self-Published.

This week we began the work on a two-minute movie trailer for Spirit of the Red Candle, journal of Mary Magdalene. I have engaged Dave, the Poet, to begin filming.

Dave, the poet, Lin, the editor, and me the writer began birthing  a storyboard for the trailer. We looked at other trailers, and we soon learned what we didn’t want.

I was positive I didn’t want a woman’s voice, which is hard to understand. I didn’t want still photos, which didn’t movie the trailer along,  and I didn’t want a video of me sitting in a chair in my living room, with all sorts of stuff on the wall behind, showing an older woman talking and making a home-made video. That might be warm and fuzzy to others, but it speaks home made to me.

I did want an audible trailer, with Dave, the Poet’s voice reading excerpts from Mary Magdalene’s journal. I wanted to show movement throughout the two minutes. I wanted to tell the story and show the journey of Mary Magdalene quickly by visual aid.

The three of us began with green-lighting. We moved away from other trailers we saw and began the process of telling what we needed to convey about the story in two minutes.

The story is placed at the Sea of Galilee in the town of Magdala. We needed to locate a body of water that was similar to the Sea of Galilee. We wanted to begin the story with the twelve year old Jewish girl and the path she takes.It is the light of  the Red Candle that will take her into a sorted demonic life of the streets and high places of the world. Her life ends with transformation.

In order to film this we laid out the storyboard, made a list of the things we needed. Dave and I stopped at Echo Lake, a small lake close by with the perfect shoreline. We began making contacts with the Music Boosters to borrow clothing and props.

We are scheduled to come back together in three weeks, look at film footage and began editing.

It is just the beginning of the first step of a new creative endeavor which we have not walked before, but we will produce a video for the website and YouTube. Let’s just hope it is all we want it to be.

I am sure it will not be exactly how we think, but it will teach us for the next step and the next.