February 2019
Hello from Orlando! For this month’s newsletter, I’m not going to bore you with the details on my progress with the next Blake Jordan novel. Just know it is coming along nicely and I’ll go into a little more detail next month on where I am with the new story.
Today, I want to write about my friend Peggy.
She first emailed me about two years ago. Like many emails I’ve received from new subscribers and fans, she let me know how much she enjoyed my Jordan novels. Peggy also gave me a little bit of feedback that I honestly did not see coming…
“You need an editor,” she wrote.
I reread her email and scratched my head. “I have an editor,” I wrote back.
“Well, then you need to get a new one,” she replied. “Ken, you have promise as a writer, but you use the word ‘that’ too often. And you use it wrong. When the subject is human, use ‘who’ not ‘that,'” she wrote along with several other nuggets of wisdom learned from someone who spent her life writing her own novels in her free time…
Things I probably should’ve learned in high school English class, but I must’ve been too busy goofing around with friends to care much about all of that grammar nonsense.
Over the years, Peggy has helped me often. I’ll bounce ideas off her for feedback. She’ll encourage me to not just use ‘Peg’s list,’ as I call my notes of what she’s taught me to fix my writing, but to learn what she’s shared so I can become a better writer.
I was so excited for her to read my latest novel, but she still found one small mistake.
“But only one,” she wrote, encouraging me and telling me how much I’ve improved.
When I asked how she was doing recently, she let me know she wasn’t doing too well.
I found out that Peggy experienced severe bone loss in her jawbone along with a few other issues. Everything can be repaired, but the copay will be $10,000 to $15,000.
Then Peggy sent me a link to a Go Fund Me page and I did what I could to help.
But after I saw how far she still had to go to meet her goal, I got to thinking about my 3,000 newsletter subscribers and the power of many people coming together to help.
I’m no math major (remember, I goofed off a lot in high school), but I realized that if my readers were so inclined to donate as little as $5, maybe Peg’s goal could be reached.
If you’ve enjoyed reading Blake Jordan’s adventures as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them, know that Peggy had a lot to do with it. There’s nothing like a gaping grammatical error in a book to take you out of the dreamlike spell the author put you in.
Thanks to Peggy, I’ve had fewer errors and learned a lot about how to write better.
Click here to read Peggy’s story and to help make her whole again. -Ken