I just heard from Beacon Hill, and they did not accept my book proposal, Spiritual Direction 101. Bonnie said they liked how I started in a conversational tone with personal experience, but then I would go into teacher/academic mode, and it wasn’t consistent. I need to be able to have a consistent voice throughout that engages the reader. I’m having this same problem with the Career Women of the Bible book proposal. Right now it has conversational/academic schizophrenia. I haven’t figured out how to have good scholarship in a conversational tone, and I really want to learn how. She offered to send me specifics of what the committee said, and I said yes! Hopefully, I’ll get some ideas on how to tone down the academia while retaining the scholarship in a conversational, reader friendly tone. I didn’t think it would be so hard! But I will keep trying. I think what I have to say is very important and needs to get out there, so I will continue to learn and write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite…. I may need to re-read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.