A Bit About LoRee Perry~

I'm so excited. Yesterday, on my personal blog I was able to post another wonderful true story of a woman's journey to faith and publication... LoRee Perry. This stuff is just too good to keep to myself, so I thought I'd share it with you! :)

LoRee, can you tell me about your journey to faith?I grew up going to church and never doubted John 3:16. But that promise wasn't real until I was 27 years old. Thanks to Bible classes I became familiar with God's Word as a girl. I went through my teens and young addulthood with this weird idea that I was a Christian and would have a few seconds before dying to ask for and receive forgiveness of sins.
One April morning in 1975, I woke up to my husband asking, "You believe in God, don't you?" Then he told me my brother had called to say our father had been murdered. It rained the day of his service and from a distance afterwards, a rainbow arced over the grave.
A few months later, on the day before Thanksgiving, my husband fell off the 2 1/2 story garage roof and crushed both heels. The three days we waited for the swelling to go down in his feet to enable surgery (they were the size of footballs), I read a paperback New Testament in the waiting room of the hospital. I have no memory of specific verses, but God's Word was my only solace.
The following April I was invited to attend a special luncheon where the speaker explained a relationship with Jesus as being personal. Jesus could be my friend as well. That was new to me. I never doubted He was the Savior of the world, but until that day it had been an ambiguous belief.

Listening to the speaker that day changed me. I recognized sin for what it really is—something incurable that I had inherited at birth, for which only Jesus Christ is the cure.

Right there, with all those women in the room, my heart screamed, Jesus is the answer for all this emptiness! I realized that, starting with my dad’s death, Jesus had been calling me to acknowledge my need for Him.

Jesus Christ met me where I was that day and flooded my whole sinful being with a peace that defied description.

That's an amazing testomy. I'm so sorry your father died, yet thankful that God redeemed that time by drawing you to Himself.
Can you tell me about your journey to publication or how/why you started writing?
I’ve been writing a long time, and I stopped for around ten years when pain was my life focus. But back to when I first started, I wrote as an outlet for grief. My first heroine was a woman going back to her home town to find out how her father had really died. By then, I was hooked on writing. Most days I couldn't not write something, even if it was only a journal entry. I’ve tried to quit writing several times, but I guess the Lord had another plan.
When I had three or four book-length manuscripts (and piled up rejections from editors in the process), I searched for an agent. Moselle ’s story was rejected by five agents, but feedback led me to believe I was close to acceptance. I had never considered going the route of an online publisher. But at the time, there was only one NY publisher that accepted unagented material, and they had rejected half my stories. Lori Graham, an editor for The Wild Rose Press and then editor for White Rose Publishing, came to Prairieland Romance Writers. She invited me to submit Moselle’s Insurance. It was rejected twice by White Rose editors, with the invitation to resubmit. I was devastated by the second, very detailed rejection letter, and quit writing for several months. At retreat in January of 2010, my fellow writers encouraged me to reconsider that best-kind-of-a rejection. So I went through the editor’s comments, agreed with her, revised, and resubmitted. Moselle ’s story was accepted in less than a week.
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You can find LoRee here...
www.loreepeery.com

Rainn on My Parade coming soon from White Rose Publishing/
Moselle's Insurance http://www.whiterosepublishing.com