Some years ago, I fired my literary agent. She had successfully shepherded my six non-fiction books to publication and I am grateful to her for that. I replaced her with another agent because he “loved” my Zen mystery novel, One Hand Killing.

He thought that fiction writing was the direction my career should take and, because I desperately wanted to believe him, I deserted someone who had not only believed in me and my writing, but someone who had become a friend.

But there were no hard feelings – it was “just business” – and I dove into re-writing the novel, trusting that my new agent would deliver.

After two years of writing draft after draft after draft, it was finally finished to the satisfaction of both my new agent and me. During that time, the book business took a nosedive and has since been transformed. For that and whatever other reasons, my new agent was unable to sell the book.

Disappointment is a mild word to describe how I felt. Let-down, abandoned, cheated, ignored are others that come closer. I felt like a failure and I had no clue what to do next. Not to mention I was broke.

But I picked up the pieces of my life that I’d put aside while in the tunnel of solitary writing and moved on. I had to cobble something together to get back on track with work doing the other things I loved to do: teaching classes, workshops and individuals how to meditate and live a mindful, spiritually fulfilling life.

Now, four years later, I’m back to teaching more, I have a new website, and I recently took the novel off the shelf it had been sitting on all this time, dusted it off, and with the encouragement of many friends and mentors, will be publishing it myself as en e-book real soon.

I can’t wait to get it out there and get back to writing the second book. I’ve missed my characters. I hope you get to like them as much as I do.