It took 28 years to complete An Anthology of Loss, Healing, and Resilience, though it feels like a blink of an eye compared to publishing the book. The original name was  Love's True Heart - A Reflection on Love, Loss, and Healing. I changed the name after getting feedback that readers might find the title confusing since it deals with more than one type of loss. I agreed and An Anthology was born! At first I tried to go the traditional route (under the original title) by finding an agent, but the agents I solicited all said the same thing - they didn't see how this fit in with what they were looking for. So, in May I decided to self-publish. The first hurdle of self-publishing was developing the cover. The first AI generated cover was too real for the stories - like an actual image if an anotomically fractured heart to represent heartbreak. Then a neighbor suggested I use an AI program called Reve. The first rendition was the heart with the birds flying away. I then came up with the great idea to incorporate an angel that my sister Karen sketched and painted just prior to her death, and the cameo is the AI generated rendition of Karen's angel. If you go to the title page, you will see the actual image, in color on ebooks and black and white in paperbacks and hardcover. The pink is sort of my signature color after battling breast cancer twice - the cover you see is where I landed. The next hurdle was uploading the book to Amazon and Barnes and Noble, which I did in May, but then found that I had to tweak the cover a few times to get it to look right. Then once I started recording the chapters for an audio version - I found little things in the book that I had to fix. Suffice it to say that, the past three months to perfect the book feels like an eternity. Then to further complicate things, I discovered that I had accidentally deleted the finished copy from Vellum and it took an entire weekend to rebuild the book, get it re-published, only to suffer a system issue on Barnes and Noble where the paperback and hardback are stuck in their review process, though the ebook uploaded properly and is available for Nook readers. Anyway, I am now content with the finished product and promise to get a replacement book to the four people who purchased the early copies.  I already sent one to my sister and the other to my cousin! Stay tuned for more to come.  Next up I will talk about how An Anthology came to be!