Sherry Jones's Blog, page 8

How I Got My Agent

The first literary agent who read the manuscript of my first novel snapped it up. Don’t hate me, though: She turned it down the first time she read it, plunging me into despair.

Why did Natasha Kern reject my first submission? As so many first-time authors have done, I sent her my first draft. She agreed to consider it after our mutual friend, author Paul Vandevelder, told her about my novel, “The Jewel of Medina.” With her rejection came a two-page letter – also unusual, written as a courtesy to my friend -- telling me, basically, that my book was a too-long, disjointed mess. Which it was.

All those creative writing classes in college, fine for short-story writing, had failed to teach me how to craft a novel. I read Natasha’s letter and realized that I really had no idea how to fix mine. So I hired freelance editor Daniel Zitin, who told me what I needed to do to make “The Jewel of Medina” work. “What you have here is not a novel, but a series of interesting events,” he wrote.

Using his suggestions, I took the book apart and re-wrote it, then sent it to a second freelance editor (Susan Lyon) and revised it again, adding in the sensual detail she suggested. this time. A year and a half later I queried Natasha again -- even though I had read that agents almost never consider a book twice. Hey, you don’t get what you don’t ask for, right? To my delight, she said “yes.” Not being one to put all my proverbial eggs into a single basket, however, I queried other agents, as well, with the help of agentquery.com.

Agent Query has, among other things, an excellent database of literary agents. It produced for me a long list of agents who represent historical fiction and who were accepting new clients. I arranged the list so that my top ten choices sat at the top, followed by my second ten, my third, etc. I sent queries to the top ten, then waited a week or two. I then sent queries to the agents in the second tier, then waited another week or two. By the time I got to the third tier, three agents had expressed interest in seeing a partial manuscript and one had enjoyed the partial and had requested the rest.

Imagine my surprise – and delight – when the phone rang one Friday noon and Natasha Kern was on the line! She loved my manuscript, she said, and she wanted to represent me. I found myself in the enviable position of telling her that I needed to check with the other agents who were considering my book before accepting her offer. Like me, however, Natasha doesn’t let the grass grow under her feet. On Sunday evening she called with detail suggestions for changes to my manuscript. We talked for an hour – and, by the time it was over, I had decided that she and I were a perfect team.

Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Don’t forget that, as a journalist, I wrote one or two articles nearly every day for thirty years. “The Jewel of Medina” wasn’t my first novel, but my fifth – after four romance novels I wrote in the 1980s that I never could get published and the obligatory autobiographical novel, truly horrible, that I would never try to publish. I researched, wrote and revised “The Jewel of Medina” over five years. I queried forty agents, receiving rejections from ninety percent of them.

In other words, there’s no secret formula to getting an agent, or to getting published. It takes hard work and perseverance. A sense of humor helps, especially when the rejection slips start rolling in. And in my case, having an author willing to make that call for me really did make a difference.

As I prepared to send my manuscript to Natasha that first time, after she’d told Paul that she would read it, I got something surprising in the mail: A form letter from her office -- in one of my self-addressed, stamped envelopes.

“Dear Author,” it read. “Thank you for submitting your query to the Natasha Kern Literary Agency. Unfortunately, your project does not appear to meet our needs at the current time. We wish you luck placing your manuscript elsewhere.”

In writing, as in every other walk of life, who you know can sometimes help you to become whom you want to be.

How I Got My Agent

The first literary agent who read the manuscript of my first novel snapped it up. Don't hate me, though: She turned it down the first time she read it, plunging me into despair.

Why did Natasha Kern reject my first submission? As so many first-time authors have done, I sent her my first draft. She agreed to consider it after our mutual friend, author Paul Vandevelder, told her about my novel, "The Jewel of Medina." With her rejection came a two-page letter – also unusual, written as a courtesy to my friend — telling me, basically, that my book was a too-long, disjointed mess. Which it was.

All those creative writing classes in college, fine for short-story writing, had failed to teach me how to craft a novel. I read Natasha's letter and realized that I really had no idea how to fix mine. So I hired freelance editor Daniel Zitin, who told me what I needed to do to make "The Jewel of Medina" work. "What you have here is not a novel, but a series of interesting events," he wrote.

Using his suggestions, I took the book apart and re-wrote it, then sent it to a second freelance editor (Susan Lyon) and revised it again, adding in the sensual detail she suggested. this time. A year and a half later I queried Natasha again — even though I had read that agents almost never consider a book twice. Hey, you don't get what you don't ask for, right? To my delight, she said "yes." Not being one to put all my proverbial eggs into a single basket, however, I queried other agents, as well, with the help of agentquery.com.

Agent Query has, among other things, an excellent database of literary agents. It produced for me a long list of agents who represent historical fiction and who were accepting new clients. I arranged the list so that my top ten choices sat at the top, followed by my second ten, my third, etc. I sent queries to the top ten, then waited a week or two. I then sent queries to the agents in the second tier, then waited another week or two. By the time I got to the third tier, three agents had expressed interest in seeing a partial manuscript and one had enjoyed the partial and had requested the rest.

Imagine my surprise – and delight – when the phone rang one Friday noon and Natasha Kern was on the line! She loved my manuscript, she said, and she wanted to represent me. I found myself in the enviable position of telling her that I needed to check with the other agents who were considering my book before accepting her offer. Like me, however, Natasha doesn't let the grass grow under her feet. On Sunday evening she called with detail suggestions for changes to my manuscript. We talked for an hour – and, by the time it was over, I had decided that she and I were a perfect team.

Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Don't forget that, as a journalist, I wrote one or two articles nearly every day for thirty years. "The Jewel of Medina" wasn't my first novel, but my fifth – after four romance novels I wrote in the 1980s that I never could get published and the obligatory autobiographical novel, truly horrible, that I would never try to publish. I researched, wrote and revised "The Jewel of Medina" over five years. I queried forty agents, receiving rejections from ninety percent of them.

In other words, there's no secret formula to getting an agent, or to getting published. It takes hard work and perseverance. A sense of humor helps, especially when the rejection slips start rolling in. And in my case, having an author willing to make that call for me really did make a difference.

As I prepared to send my manuscript to Natasha that first time, after she'd told Paul that she would read it, I got something surprising in the mail: A form letter from her office — in one of my self-addressed, stamped envelopes.

"Dear Author," it read. "Thank you for submitting your query to the Natasha Kern Literary Agency. Unfortunately, your project does not appear to meet our needs at the current time. We wish you luck placing your manuscript elsewhere."

In writing, as in every other walk of life, whom you know can sometimes help you to become whom you want to be.

Walking the Slut Walk Every Day

I'm going to miss Slut Walk Spokane today. And I feel bad about that. Because, after a lifetime of shame and denial, I would so love to march down our streets in my skimpies and proclaim myself a sexual female with pride and unabashed joy.

I love sex. I enjoy it most in the context of a committed relationship, but I've had my share of exciting one-night stands, too. And why not? Sex feels good, it's fun, and it provides me with opportunities to give pleasure to others. I'm a "happy animal" in the sack, as my friend Rose says. I'd have it every day – or more — if I could.

So there. Now I've said it, and publicly: I'm proud to be a slut. But it hasn't always been so.

When I first ventured into the weird and wonderful world of sex — it was 1979, and I was 18 – I did so secretly, fearing for my "reputation" in the small Southern town where we lived. By then, feminism had empowered me enough to have sex before marriage, but not enough to claim my sexual desires as healthy and normal. Then my mother found my birth control pills and, after I returned home from a date, called me a slut.

"How many boys have touched you?" she asked.

My blood hummed in my ears. Three, I mumbled.

"How many does it take before you're a slut?" she said — and threw me out of the house.

For most of the history of humanity, shame has been the companion of the sexually active woman. From Hester Prynne to Monica Lewinsky, we've been shunned, condemned, mocked, and slandered for doing what comes naturally in the rest of the animal kingdom. An indignant friend told me in college of a rumor she'd heard that I'd slept with the entire basketball team. She wasn't indignant because it was a lie, but because she believed it might be true.

And so what if it had been true? Isn't it my body, and my business what I do with it? Apparently not. "Promiscuous" was the sneering term employed for women like me, while sexually active men were admired as "studs." At age twenty, in effort to change myself, I married a man who didn't enjoy sex. Needless to say, the marriage was a disaster.

In the ensuing years, I learned to embrace my sexuality, and I found men who valued it. Nevertheless, deep down inside I felt unclean. This notion was reinforced at work. A nightlife reporter, I was criticized for dancing in the "mosh pit" of a tiny punk bar and then writing about it, while a male reporter did the same at a Pearl Jam concert and got published on the front page. Our publisher passed a dress code requiring underwear; rumors flew that my refusal to wear a harness – oops! bra — inspired the new rules.

Four years ago, my teen-aged daughter introduced me to "Sex and the City" – I am not a TV watcher — and my world rocked. For the first time, I witnessed smart, professional, single women – women like me! – getting it on with gusto, living sexually active lives without a lick of guilt or a syllable of moral doubt. Carrie, the angst-filled writer; Miranda, the tough-as-nails attorney; sweet Charlotte, and the uber-sexual Samantha — a Jones! — dated and mated all over New York and then talked about it without shame over breakfast. I felt validated. Watching it, I felt as if society were finally giving me permission to truly be myself.

Then I read mocking comments about the show. "Sluts in the City," some called it. And I realized that my culture still had a long way to go before it would bestow the same sexual freedoms onto women that men have possessed since the beginning of time.

The situation for women has worsened in recent years. As Susan Faludi noted in her book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women," for every step that we take toward equality and empowerment, culture tries to push us back two more. Now, society tells us that we're to blame for being raped if we dress provocatively (even if we're eleven years old), if we bring a man home with us, or if we, like CNN's Lara Logan, venture into danger zones — or wear a low-cut dress.

Now lawmakers around America are proposing – and passing – laws denying women access to abortion services and birth control. Coincidence? I think not. Men want to reign us in. By controlling our sexuality, they control us. But we have a backlash of our own on its way, starting in the streets and marching its way to the polls next election.

How I would love to be there, dancing down the street with my sexual sisters, showing the whole world what I'm made of: flesh and blood and bone, desire and passion, moxie and chutzpah. I'm a slut. It feels good to say it. How many boys does it take? None, actually. I'm a happy animal. I was born this way.

Self-Publishing: Carpeing the Diem, or Wasting Time?

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The "cover" for my ebook/short story, "Rapture"

Like internet dating, self-publishing is something I always swore I would never do. Like internet dating, it seemed an act of desperation, the last resort for writers who couldn't get published in any other, legitimate, way.

Then news that an Oakland, California religious group had predicted the Rapture and ensuing Apocalypse would happen on May 21, 2011 reminded me of that short story I'd always meant to send out for publication. Rapture, it's called, about a Los Angeles born-again Christian and anti-abortion protester who finds herself left behind when the Great Snatch occurs. Of the stories I've written, it's one of my favorites because of its wicked sense of humor as well as the questions it raises about faith, love, and judgment.

I pulled it up on my computer screen and re-read it, then edited it one more time, trimming it a bit and updating some of the topical references. I found myself wishing that others could read it now, when interest in the topic was so high and when its message seemed especially relevant. Of course, the only way to gratify that desire was to self-publish.

I wrote to my agent, Natasha Kern, and told her my plan. She suggested Kindle for me over, for instance, Smashwords, because it's easiest and reaches the most readers. So I went to Kindle and formatted and uploaded my story. It was surprisingly easy to do — I only had to start over once.

The only point of confusion for me lay in which royalty rate to choose: Selecting 30 percent would have allowed me to charge just 99 cents for my story but would have given me only 30 cents each time it was read. The 70 percent option, which seems more fair to me, would require me to charge $2.99. Although I might sell more copies with a 99 cent price, I value my work more highly than that. So I went with the 70 percent option.

When I'd finished entering my story, to my disappointment I learned that I'd have to wait 24 hours for it to appear for sale on Kindle's site — and another 24 hours after that on the Amazon UK (Great Britain) and .de (Germany) sites. But — I didn't wait until then to start publicizing. I posted notifications on my Facebook friend page and fan page as well as Twitter tweets that the story was on its way.

When it finally appeared, I entered a frenzy of self-promotion:

– On Twitter, I scheduled tweets linking to the "Rapture" Amazon page every hour until midnight (sorry, Twitter followers!) and sent out DMs to friends I've found especially helpful there.

– On Facebook, I created an event invitation telling friends about my story and linking to the page, then manually invited all 1,700 of my friends. At one point, the Facebook Police refused to let me invite any more, so I created a second, identical, event and invited all the rest. I also posted an update on my fan page and my "Sherry Jones fans" group page, and sent a message to everyone in the group.

– I sent a mass email to everyone in my address book. Only one person asked to be removed from my list!

– I sent the link to my website administrator and asked him to place it on my home page.

– I entered the story in Goodreads. Since you can't recommend your own book there, I added it to my shelf and then, instead of reviewing, said I'd written "Rapture" and thought it was really good. My 300 or so Goodreads friends will see it, if they read their friends' updates.

– I created a profile for it on Shelfari, then thanked the one person there who had somehow heard of my story and added it to his shelf.

Whew! That's a lot of self-promotion — kind of like internet dating.

Several writers have asked how I'm faring with the self-publishing of my short story. As you might have guessed, the publishing part was easy. Getting the word out that my story exists is trickier. I feel embarrassed to be shouting about myself all the time, but I know I have to do it if I want people to read "Rapture."

And then there's the time. On a deadline with my new novel, I essentially lost a full day revising and publishing my story, and have spent more hours doing publicity. And I suspect there's more I should be doing but haven't thought of.

As for sales, I won't know until I get a check from Amazon — if I get a check — but "Rapture" has hovered in the Kindle rankings at about 35,000. That's not great, but I'm guessing it could be a lot worse.

Will self-publishing end up being worth the work and the worry for me? It's too soon to say, but I'm optimistic. After all, I signed up for Match.com a little over a year ago, and met the great love of my life. I'll never say "never" again!

Passion: More Than Just Play

In 52 years of marriage,Vladimir Nabokov wrote hundreds of love letters to his wife, Vera.

This I find touching, even moving. But surprising? Hardly. Nabokov was a writer, after all, and no doubt he expressed himself most perfectly via the written word.

He was also, as anyone knows who has read "Lolita," a man of great passion. As degraded and delusional a character as Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of that complex, beautiful, disturbing book, could only have been drawn by an author in touch with his own dark side, someone fully aware of his passions, both repressed and expressed.

Reading about his letters — Knopf will publish 300 of them next year as a book, "Love Letters to Vera" — has me thinking today about passion, and my own approach to life and love.

For as long as I can remember, passion has informed my life's choices. I loved school — which my teenage daughter finds extremely weird — and threw myself into my studies. I graduated at the top of my class in high school and, throughout the 28 years it took me to earn my bachelor's degree in college, received only two Bs, neither of which was my fault, of course.

When I was young, I was very religious. I remember feeling envious of black people, whose church services teemed with excitement and self-expression. When I discovered Pentecostalism, I was fascinated by the shouts and waving of hands and speaking in tongues and simultaneous, sometimes spontaneous, prayers filling the chapel with discord. (It's too bad that Pentecostals are also passionate about the whole "God is the head of the Church and man is the head of the household" schtick.)

In my career choices, I always followed my bliss, opting for journalism over engineering, for example. A whiz at math and science as well as English, I eschewed the money-making profession because of my love for words and my desire to make a difference in the world. Those same passions fueled the writing of my first novels, "The Jewel of Medina" and "The Sword of Medina," which took six years to research and write and caused me to lose my full-time newspaper reporting job.

Yesterday, I celebrated not only Thanksgiving but also the six-month anniversary of the day I met the man I love as I have loved no other.

Part of our celebration included reading aloud the love letters we've written to each other. This was my idea and, I must admit, I worried that it might come off as too sentimental. But it worked beautifully, reminding us how our feelings for each other began — what it was that attracted us to each other, what held us there — and showing us how those feelings have evolved into a deepening intimacy. I have no doubt that our passion will grow over time as our knolwedge of each other increases, in part because that is what we both want.

When I was working at the Missoulian, I angsted over whether to go back to work full-time, as my editor was demanding, or to insist on remaining part-time so that I could finish writing "The Jewel of Medina." The novel was my true calling, I felt, but I was afraid to let go of the paying gig. A dream that night gave me my answer. In it, I dove from a high board into a deep pool. "Don't put all your eggs in the Missoulian basket," I heard a voice say.

The deep pool represents the unconscious mind, which is where our seat of passion lies. I plunged into that pool and refused to increase my work hours. My editor fired me, but I soon found a freelance job that paid as much for part-time work as I'd been making full-time at my old job. Since then, I've published two novels and have a contract for my third with Gallery, a division of Simon and Schuster.

My passionate approach to living has gotten me into trouble. I've been married, and divorced, three times. I've been chastised by cautious editors for my ruthless coverage of local politics and politicians. I got death threats and, worse, sneering reviews, for writing about the Prophet Muhammad and his child bride. But so what? It's better than not loving, not caring, not writing.

We only get one chance at life, as far as I know, and only about 80 years of it. It's not nearly enough for all I want to do. My answer is to do the things I feel most passionate about — loving, writing, playing music, dancing — and to trust that my love will be returned; that my writing will sustain itself; that my music will someday bring joy to others, and that my dancing will keep my spirit as well as my body limber and free. Along the way, I hope to make a positive difference in the world.

And if not? I'll finish my life without regrets. As Tennyson wrote, "'Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all." No one will say of Sherry Jones that she didn't squeeze every last drop out of life, or that she didn't give back.

Can you say the same about yourself? Are you living the passionate life? Or is it time to find your own blisses, and to follow them?

You Are So Selfish — And That's a Good Thing.

The man I love is a composer of classical music. He is also a music professor and conductor, which makes his time for writing very precious. "I guess I'm selfish in that way," he said recently, as calmly — and non-judgmentally — as if he were discussing his hair color. I caught my breath. Selfishness, I suddenly realized, is not always a bad thing.

I wish I had $100 for every time a man in my life has called me "selfish." One lover accused me of "neglecting the family" by sitting at my computer to write before going to work in the morning and in the evenings after dinner. I had to laugh: I had been doing this for less than a week. Another was hurt and angry when I asked him to please stop walking into my office to kiss my neck while I worked. "It pulls me out of the dream, and it's not always easy for me to get back in," I said. Another man could not give me even just one afternoon to myself in our tiny house so that I could write in solitude.

I could go on and on about this, but you get the point.

I read somewhere that, when someone calls you "selfish," they really mean you're not doing what they want you to do. So when I can't drive you to the mechanic but ask you to take the bus so that I can write, I'm selfish. When I don't make dinner for you because I'm writing, I'm self-centered. When I can't stop talking about the characters in my new novel, I'm self-absorbed. And so on.

Sure, I have a selfish streak. Who doesn't? Sometimes my ego interrupts my love flow. For instance, I don't always do well with last-minute change. I might focus on my own feelings of disappointment, to the exclusion of everyone else's needs, as acutely as if I were a little girl, which I am in that moment, I suppose. But some varieties of selfishness are positive — such as jealously guarding one's creative time against the demands others want to place on it.

Another friend dislikes the term "selfish," preferring "self care" instead. Whatever you call it, considering the needs of the self is crucial to producing anything truly self-expressive, which is the essence of art. If you believe, as I do, that art touches and enhances the soul, then the artist's selfish insistence on a "room of one's own" becomes an act of selflessness! As they tell us on airplanes, we've got to put the oxygen mask on our own faces first before we can help others with theirs.

A fellow creative soul, Bob doesn't blink an eye when I tell him I need to write, and so can't watch his daughter for him on a given morning, or when I don't cook that dinner I promised because I got caught up in my novel again. On the other hand, he has canceled dates with me at the last minute because he was swept up in the creative flow, and we don't sleep together as often as I might like because late nights are his most creative time.

Is it ever a struggle for me, being with another creative soul? Sometimes. On the other hand, it's liberating, too. Bob's claiming his time for his "inner life" gives me permission to do the same. As we gain opportunities to support each other's creative lives, our spiritual bond grows stronger. And there is one thing, at least, about which I am completely certain: Bob will never call me selfish. Except, maybe, as a form of praise.

Let's take our country back!

Here's the text of my speech against Islamophobia given at Portland State University Friday, Oct. 29:

As the author of two novels about the Prophet Muhammad and his controversial bride A'isha bint Abi Bakr, I know something about hate. I know something about fear. Some people hate me because they think I'm an Islamophobe. Islamophobes hate me because I'm not. I've been called, on the one hand, an "enemy of Islam," and on the other, an "Islamopanderer."

I'm neither one. Here's what I am: a writer who found a story I wanted to tell, that I thought might make a positive difference in the world. And my books have done that. By increasing people's understanding of Islam and its founders, "The Jewel of Medina" and "The Sword of Medina" have, as one Florida man told me, "put a human face on the Muslim religion." Yet it's not enough. There is so much more to do. Islamophobia is on the rise. But you and I have the power, if we will seize it, to turn the tide against fear and hate. That's what I'm going to talk about today.

If I were a Muslim living in America right now, I would feel very nervous.

Rarely does a day go by when we don't read or hear of some new anti-Muslim incident: Fox News's Bill O'Reilly blaming all Muslims for the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001; protest over a proposed mosque in Tennessee; Florida preacher Terry Jones threatening to publicly burn Qur'ans last Sept. 11; outrage over the proposed Park51 community center in New York because it contains a Muslim prayer space.

It might seem that, nine years after those Sept. 11 attacks, we in America would have resolved our anger over it, and the fears that sparked that anger. I remember my own anxieties after hearing the news of the plane crashes, wondering if we would ever feel safe and secure in this country again. Nine years later, I'm still wondering that. But terrorists aren't the ones who scare me, not anymore. The enemy, in my mind, has changed, and is far more dangerous.

"Fear became a familiar flavor, mixed daily into our bread," I wrote in my first novel, "The Jewel of Medina." That's how A'isha, the prophet Muhammad's youngest wife and the book's protagonist, describes waiting for an army of ten thousand to invade Medina in the famous Battle of the Trench. But it also describes our mood in the U.S. today.

The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave has become, after 9/11, the land of the fearful and the home of the hater. Non-Muslims eye their Muslim neighbors with suspicion after being told that lethally trained terrorists now walk among us. We hear right-wing politicians and commentators warning us constantly about the "spread" of Islam in the U.S., as if it were a contagious disease. Alarmists tell us that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim, and that Muslims want to take over the world.

Election season, as usual, has pushed the hysteria to a fevered pitch. In that hotbed of Muslim extremism, Oklahoma, voters will soon consider a proposed constitutional amendment forbidding courts from using sharia law as a basis for rulings. According to a news article, proponents say the amendment "will prevent the takeover of Oklahoma by Islamic extremists who want to undo America from the inside out." And at a recent Tea Party convention in Tennessee, blogger Pamela Geller proclaimed, "We are at a point of having to take a stand against all Muslims. There is no good or bad Muslim. There is [sic] only Muslims and they are embedded in our government, military and other offices…. What more must we wait for to take back this country of ours?"

I've been wondering the same thing. How do those of us who cherish the notion of America as a "melting pot" of cultures, races, and religions take back our country from the haters? It won't be easy, because there's money to be made from war in the Middle East, and American citizens won't support those wars unless we fear and hate the enemy.

I'm not profiting from the so-called "War on Terror." I'll bet you aren't, either. Nor are the people in the Middle East we supposedly are there to help, more than 66,000 civilians killed in Iraq alone in the seven years we've been there. Nor is our country's economy, which is being bled to death as the U.S. spends as much as $12 billion per month on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Who profits? Big Oil. Halliburton. Blackwater. International banks. Politicians. And the tragedy is, we in America have let ourselves be duped by the fearmongering and lured into a war that never ends because, in the War on Terror, there is no tangible enemy to be defeated. Terror is an idea, and ideas can't be eradicated.

In fact, a new report confirms what so many of us have long suspected: U.S. occupation abroad has actually increased terrorism.

In the scholarly journal "Foreign Policy," Robert Pape writes,

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research that we conducted at the University of Chicago's Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day. As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically – from about 300 from 1980 to 2003 (avg 13 per yr), to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009 (360 per yr). Further, over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American. The vast majority of suicide terrorists hail from the local region threatened by foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are Afghans.

In other words, our country's actions are strengthening the enemy we are supposedly trying to defeat. Yet support for these wars continues, and Islamophobia is the fuel that fires that support.

The warmongers will keep profiting, and the rest of us will keep losing — economically, emotionally, and morally — until we stop fighting one another and recognize whom our true enemies are. Our true enemies aren't in the Middle East or in a Florida church or in a mosque in New York. They're not terrorists or even big corporations or the government. Our true enemies are the fear and hatred that lurk in our own hearts. And there is only one way to defeat hatred and fear. Only one way.

I want to tell you a story now, about my own struggles with fear in the weeks and months after worldwide controversy erupted over "The Jewel of Medina." They were by far the darkest days and nights I have ever experienced, but in true "trial by fire" fashion, they transformed me. In the face of riots, death threats and an incredible amount of hatred, I somehow found within myself the antidote to fear.

***

"The Jewel of Medina" tells the story of A'isha bint Abi Bakr, whom Islamic traditions say married Muhammad when she was nine years old. The Prophet was fifty-four, and the best friend of A'isha's father, Abu Bakr. Her tender age is often cited to justify Islamophobia, but I have found that not even Muslim scholars agree as to how old she really was. Some say she would have been at least fifteen, or even nineteen when she married him. I kept her age as nine at marriage, but delayed the consummation until she was fourteen. The Prophet Muhammad I found in my studies was a strong supporter of women and women's equality, and would not have forced himself on a nine-year-old girl.

"The Jewel of Medina" is partly a love story, partly a feminist tale with a strong, heroic female protagonist, and partly a tale of the founding of Islam. The three famous battles — at Badr, Uhud, and the Battle of the Trench in Medina — are depicted, as well as the joys and difficulties of life in the Prophet's always-growing harem. All the characters, including A'isha and the Prophet Muhammad, are depicted as human beings with human weaknesses and strengths, flaws and perfections.

"The Sword of Medina" takes place after Muhammad's death, when A'isha acted as adviser to three of the caliphs who governed the Islamic umma after Muhammad. It describes what I imagine to be the growing tension between A'isha and Muhammad's cousin Ali that led to the Battle of the Camel, as well as the tensions in the umma over the expansion of Islam. This book has two protagonists, telling the story partly from A'isha's point of view and partly from Ali's, and it culminates in the Battle of the Camel, the first Islamic civil war, in which A'isha rode into battle against Ali on the back of a camel.

I wrote "The Jewel of Medina" over a period of five years, reading everything I could find in English — some thirty books in all, including the Quran — and studying Islamic history and Arabic at the University of Montana. In 2007, my agent, Natasha Kern, sold world publishing rights to Ballantine Books, a division of Random House. The editors and other staff there loved the tale, and were lining up an eight-city book tour for me and the Book of the Month Club had scheduled "The Jewel of Medina" as a featured title.

In May 2008, three months before "The Jewel of Medina" was scheduled for publication, Random House got a call from a Middle Eastern Studies professor named Denise Spellberg, who had read an advance copy of "The Jewel of Medina." Prof. Spellberg told Random House that my book was "more dangerous than the Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons." If Ballantine proceeded with publication, she warned, Random House would surely be attacked my Muslim terrorists, and there would be riots around the world. Ballantine executives decided to "indefinitely postpone" publication of my books. Convinced that the Western world needed these novels now, I terminated my contract with them.

A Muslim-American journalist, Asra Nomani, reported this disturbing event in the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Nomani, who had read "The Jewel of Medina," was amused by Prof. Spellberg's claims that it was "soft-core pornography" — "The Jewel of Medina" doesn't have a single sex scene — but the rest of the Muslim world was not amused. Soon angry Muslims were calling me a kaafira, which is an insulting term used to describe non-Muslims; a blasphemer, and a prostitute who deserved beheading or stoning. Remember: the book had not yet been published.

Anjem Choudary, a radical Muslim living in the UK, told CNN that I might deserve the death penalty; calls for my execution sprang up all over the internet. In Bangladesh, a crowd of men screamed and pumped their fists in the air in protest against my unpublished book while soldiers stood nearby in riot gear. In Serbia, an Islamic leader who apparently had not read "JOM" said it contained "brutal scenes of pornography" and demanded that my publisher withdraw all copies from bookstores and turn them over to him to burn — or else. In London, three Muslim extremists set fire to my British publisher's home office in the middle of the night, causing him to cancel his plans to publish the novel and its sequel.

Once "The Jewel of Medina" was published, Islamophobes reacted just as angrily, calling me a wack job, denouncing my book as "trash," and accusing me of creating the controversy in order to sell more books. And their anti-Muslim rhetoric increased, to my great dismay, blaming Muslims for Ballentine Books's decision to cancel publication even though neither they nor their parent company, Random House, had received any threats.

I gave interviews to media around the world, day and night. Invariably, I would always be asked about fear. Aren't you afraid you'll be killed? Not wanting to contribute to the Islamophobic dialogue, I always said 'no,' even as I trembled in my top-floor apartment with the blinds closed, afraid of being shot; as I walked the alleys instead of the streets in downtown Spokane, afraid of being seen; as I awoke night after night, my heart pounding, after yet another dream of being chased by terrorists. After several days of this stress I ran away, fleeing to a friend's house on a Montana mountaintop. I refused to give interviews. I shut down my blog. I wanted only peace.

But peace wouldn't come, not yet.

When a journalist tracked me down with the news that Muslims were protesting my book in Serbia two days after its publication there, I was sickened. Prof. Spellberg's predictions were coming true, I thought. I wondered: "What have I done?" My rational self reminded me that I am not responsible for other's actions or reactions, but nevertheless, I felt paralyzed by despair.

A Serbian editor asked me to write a response to the protests for his newspaper. I hesitated: I didn't want to deal with this any more. I just wanted it to stop.

I stood in the guest room of my friend's house, crying. I looked out the window at the beautiful blue sky. I thought, "Help me!" And then, I felt warmth spread through me, and calm. I remembered, in that instant, what I am all about, why I wrote these books to begin with.

Love is why I wrote "The Jewel of Medina" and its sequel, "The Sword of Medina." Not love for Islam, although hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric after 9/11 did send me to the library to learn more about the religion. But I wrote these books because I found A'isha's story so inspiring, and because I wanted to share the surprising things I had learned about Islam with the rest of the world. Understanding leads to empathy, and empathy leads to peace. Love for humanity, a desire to bring people together, to build bridges of understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims, led me to write them.

"Love, peace, strength, and courage." This, I decided should be my mantra from now on. My fear flew out the window, never to return. I sat down and wrote that article for the Serbian paper. "My intentions," I wrote, "were to celebrate these great historical figures while dispelling misunderstandings about Islam."

I wrote, "Novels can give the gift of empathy, helping us to understand those who are not like us by placing us inside their hearts and minds. I began my novel as a tribute to A'isha and to all the women who played crucial roles in the forming of the early Islamic community. As I read, and as I wrote, I developed a keen empathy for these women, and for Muhammad."

From that place of perfect love, I wrote not with anger, fear, or hatred, but with love. The newspaper editor later told me that my column made a huge impact on its readers. Soon the Muslim community was calling for the publication of "The Jewel of Medina" in Serbia, and my publisher was able to return it to bookstores there. Today, I have met and corresponded with many Serbian readers, Muslim and non-Muslim, who say my books have given them a new understanding of Islam and a new role model of strength in A'isha.

"Perfect love," the Bible says, "casts out fear." In the struggle against Islamophobia — and against all forms of hate — I've found that perfect love is the perfect response. It's the response that we all need to make together in order to wipe out the meanness being spread by the hatemongers and warmongers — including extremest Muslims such as Adam Gadahn, the al-Qaida spokesman who wants Muslims living in the United States to carry out terrorist attacks on our soil. This call fits right in with Osama bin Laden's aim of weakening our country by dividing us, by turning us against one another. Remember that saying, "United we stand; divided, we fall"? We don't have to fall for these divisive tactics, even if others do.

Last week, seven members of the fundamentalist Westboro Batptist Church in Kansas came to Spokane, Washington, where I live, to protest homosexuality. They waved signs reading, "God Hates Fags," and "God Is Your Enemy." As if God would hate any of His or Her children, when we humans love our kids no matter what they do. We might not love what they do, but we cannot help loving them. How much more perfect must be the love of God for humanity?

How did Spokane respond to this demonstration of hatred and intolerance? We created a "love train," a moving counter-protest that followed the Westboro haters throughout the day to every protest site. As many as one thousand people participated in a spirit of love, drowning out the voices of hate.

If we are to conquer Islamophobia, we must do the same. We cannot silence the voices of hatred and fear in our country, for the right to free speech is crucial to democracy, but we can overwhelm them with the counter-message of love, empathy and tolerance.

The main difficulty for moderate Muslims — indeed, for all moderate voices — lies in being heard. Journalists have a saying: "Dog bites man" isn't news. "Man bites dog" is news. The news is the unusual. That's why a questionable character such as Terry Jones gets coverage when he announces that he's going to burn Qur'ans — the quintessential Bonfire of the Vanities, drawing attention to himself, and helped along by media outlets just as desperate for attention.

In order to effect change, we lovers need attention, too. Dramatic gestures are a must. If we want to take our country back from the haters, we need to make a big, grand, glorious demonstration of love.

Next year comes the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. You can bet the haters will be out in full force, pointing fingers and spewing their venom against Muslims. The media will be right there to give them the attention they crave. But what about the rest of us? What can we do?

Here's my idea: Let's join together on Sept. 11, 2011, in a vast, dramatic love-fest, Muslim and non-Muslim, to express our sorrow over the tragedy of 9/11 and our joint opposition to terrorism. Think of the impact such an observance could have, and of the message that it would send not only thoughout America, but to the world — a message of unity, one that would strengthen us all against the divisive forces of hate.

The Qur'an says that we are all created from a single soul. What a beautiful idea. Isn't it time we acted like it? Let's stand together and show the haters that we are all patriots, that we all care about the United States of America, that we are all of us, regardless of our origins or our spiritual beliefs or the color of our skin, we are all Americans, and that it is our country, too.

Let's join together, united, in a spirit of love — and take our country back.

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