About the author
Andrea Ezerins
In 2004, I was an insurance executive with a very busy home life, when inspiration struck. I wish it came to me in a dream like it did for my hero Stephanie Meyers and her story Twilight, but it came to me while sitting on a plane ride coming home from another boring business trip. This was back then you still carried notebooks and I wrote down the four pages of my idea for the ending of a book. It was an interesting twist to your typical love story. When I reread these four pages, I almost cried as I felt the pain and the loss it revealed. I decided then and there that I would write the rest of the story. I just needed to figure out the beginning and middle that not only did justice to my ending but also made the whole thing plausible. So, with no real plan other than that, I set to work. My girls were eleven, nine and the twins were four so needless to say, not tons of free time, never mind the full-time job, but thankfully a very considerate and helpful husband. I handwrote in three sets of notebooks the story over the next twelve years. Told you, not much free time. Then I spent a year plus transferring that scribble onto my computer. I tried every shortcut I could find, dragon speak, paying my kids to type it and discovered there was no way to make it quick or easy. It just took time and was the most painful thing about this whole process and let me tell you there are other parts that were pretty painful. After a year of typing dangerously, I started editing.
As a business person, I’m used to reviewing my work for grammar and sentence structure errors. I’m not used to trying to develop characters, dialogue or story arcs and themes, so I didn’t do much of that. I did find tons of duplications that clearly needed to be deleted. Turns out if you take fifteen years to write something, you easily forget that your characters already did this or that.
It was during this phase, I concluded that while I can tell a story (my family has said sometimes my stories are longer than the actual events), I’m not a naturally gifted writer. In support of that statement, let me tell you what my good friend Tom said when he found out I wrote a book. “You? But you can barely write a good business email.” And he isn’t wrong. Tom is a gifted writer and can turn a phrase better than anyone I know and therefore could have written a book much easier than I. But with perseverance, I churned out a novel and that is the difference. Despite it being a slog, I kept at it and wrote my story, and I can’t help but point out that Tom has yet to produce a novel or even a short story.
Ultimately, I reached a point where I could not read my novel one more time. I had done all I could do, so I turned to the professionals. Katie Walsh was the perfect first editor for me. She understood my fears and fragile ego. This was scary stuff. Katie went through numerous rounds of editing and was so sweet, kind and supportive, she coaxed me along, helping me see what needed changing, tightening, and expanding. After Katie finished, I thought I was ready to tackle self-publishing, whatever that was. I found Mary Neighbor, “book shepherd “, and she continued shaping the story, characters, and storyline. I was getting on a roll realizing with each person’s input, the story was getting better. While for one quick second, I dreamed of going the traditional publishing path, everything I read about the Big Five said it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and actually was soul sucking. Having worked in Corporate America, I fully understood the potential for the experience to be soul sucking and I didn’t want to subject me or my baby to that. Michelle Brooks to the rescue. She suggested She Writes Press, a hybrid press that supports women authors, I thought, Great, 50% or more of the competition gone just because of a chromosome. Sweet. I connected with the wonderful Brooke Warner and the rest is history.
Brooke, Krissa and Addison again worked with me on my story. Channels (former name) was yellow lighted for a year plus. I worked and reworked my story and got green lighted in 2022 with the publication date of September 2024 for Again and Again Back to You (New title). I’ve been very lucky to get to this point and as I get ready to step off the cliff and introduce the world to my book, I said, “Who needs a parachute.” So, I decided to retire from my corporate job at the end of 2023 and focus on launching my new career. What has kept me going all these years has been the belief in my story. I wanted my kernel of an idea to become the best little story it could so here we are.
P.S. I’ve written a second book which came about after my friend Tricia read Again and Again Back to You, she wisely and snidely said, “Well, everyone has one story in them, the real test is do you have a second one?” During COVID and the gaps in revising Again and Again Back to You, I wrote a modern retelling of The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery. See The Green Forest in the book tab to read more about that. I’m just starting the process so unsure where it will lead.