On July 14, 2009 I took a deep breath and looked at the sentence I had just written down: "You are a beautiful mess." Were these the last words of my book?  A 12-chapter creative non-fiction venture of my life, done?  No, they weren't and it wasn't.  I picked up the pen again, "Thanks be to God." That was the end, and I meant it.  I began to cry and what followed were two hours of bawling my eyes out.

It was out of me.  All 65,000 words. Out. I wanted to run to Kinkos, print it out and hold all of those clean pages in my hands. The words of a my college professor, Dr. Spencer, haunted me in that moment, "If you live by technology, you will die by technology." I had about eight yellow writing pads full of ideas and first drafts, but I edit when I transfer them to my Mac. So there was a pressing desire to leave my sacred writing space and start the real editing process on paper.