Beyond Words

I'm excited to welcome Jeni Decker, author, mom and all 'round great lady to my blog today. Her latest book is a memoir, I Wish I were Engulfed in Flames: My Insane Life Raising Two Boys with Autism is truly a fabulous read. Please tell us a little about your memoir I Wish I were Engulfed in Flames: My Insane Life Raising Two Boys with Autism and why you wrote it. Well, the whole thing snuck up on me like the swine flu, the symptoms fairly banal until suddenly it felt like I was hooked up to life support with a priest administering last rites in the form of a cattle-prod shoved up my…                 …okay, so that lasted about fifteen minutes, relatively speaking. A friend once told me that I was lucky to have my life. “While you’re enjoying an eight course meal, most people are sitting down with a frozen dinner.” Boy, was she ever right. Profundity; you can’t find it in the frozen food section.   I...

  Self-Publishing Controversial Titles by Jeni Decker By "controversial" I mean, “books I can’t imagine traditional publishers taking a risk on in this dicey economy.” Waiting for Karl Rove is one of those books. It’s irreverent satire, chock full of politically incorrect content, and the “characters” are public figures, mainly in the political arena. Not to mention that it’s kind of a lampoon against the publishing industry, as a whole. Oh, and we (my writing partner, Kat Nove and I) wrote ourselves into the book as dueling protagonists - each writing a chapter in first person, alternately. So, yeah, risky. We did get some good feedback from a few agents and small publishers, who chuckled at the cheeky query letter and wished us good luck, Godspeed, and many happy returns (probably while deleting our initial query from their inbox after sharing it with everyone within a fifty mile radius and guffawing at our unmitigated gall). The industry doesn’t seem willing to tak...