The Ballad of a Manuscript

by Julie Coulter Bellon

(sung to the Gilligan's Island theme song)

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started sometime way last March
By giving my manuscript

My girl was a secret agent gal,
The hero brave and sure.
Five readers reassured me
that the story wasn’t poor, the story wasn’t poor.

The evaluations were getting rough,
The manuscript was tossed,
If I didn’t do all the rewrites
Acceptance would be lost, acceptance would be lost.

I kept on with rewriting, I needed a desert isle
With chocolate
and my husband too,
Instead I got
seven kids,
No time to spare
A manuscript to rewrite
it was taking me a while

So this is the tale of the manuscript,
I rewrote it for a long, long time,
I tried to make the best of things,
It was an uphill climb.

I changed the story all around
I did my very best,
To make the publisher more comfortable,
So their answer would be yes.

Yesterday I got an email,
Patience was all it took,
My story is accepted,
Next spring it will be a book.

So join us here each week my friends,
You can hear all about progress,
My rewrites finally hit the mark,
A miracle no less