When I Came West is Laurie Wagner Buyer’s account of her terrifying and exhilarating years in Montana as she changes from a girl too squeamish to touch a dead mouse to a toughened frontierswoman unafraid to butcher a domestic animal. Living in a cabin far away from family and friends, with the nearest neighbor four miles away, Laurie finds herself caught up in two love affairs: one with the volatile Vietnam vet Bill and one with the untamed West—even as she recognizes, in the words of one neighbor, “It is plumb foolishness to love something that cannot love you back.”
A few books are still available on Amazon and from her publisher.
Laurie’s 9th Letter: (Sent to DK with Permission to print)
Matt Bokovoy, however, continued to champion my cause and wrote me “cheer up” notes often. He said, “My experienced opinion is that you need not worry about the salty review from the second reader…the first reviewer’s credentials are established nationally, and as an author and editor, that reader’s opinion is highly reliable.
We’ll have to go to a third reader that is more open-minded, and probably more well-read. Don’t be too sensitive about it. If all books never received criticism, people would have stopped writing them a long time ago, because all truths would have been told already! No writer can please everybody, so ignore those who do not like your work. …I think the manuscript is great and will continue to work on it until I am satisfied that I have two very good evaluations in hand.”
Added to Matt’s caring concern, were plenty of encouragement from my husband-to-be, my mother, my personal readers, and notes from people who had heard about the book through the grapevine. Matt wrote to say that the manuscript was out with a third reviewer and he expected to have a response by mid-July.
I saw Chuck Rankin at the WWA conference and we had a good talk after the book signing. I thanked him for believing in my story and told him I was “blessed to have an editor like Matt Bokovoy.” Chuck replied, “You are in good hands with him.” By August we were still waiting for a response from a third reader and then I was informed by Matt that just to make sure things went well he had asked for a fourth reader.
He wrote, “I appreciate your patience through the review process, but the negative review, with its biases, disallowed me from taking the project to the table for approval. It won’t be much longer until the reviews are in, and the project will be much stronger for it.”