We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful R.h. Bird. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with R.H. below.

R.H., appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I was diagnosed with MS in 2009. Prior to that I was a Financial Advisor at a major Wall Street firm, and married, with three awesome daughters . Everything seemed to be going great prior to the illness. I remember having a conversation with friends and we were talking about our greatest fears. Mine was that I wouldn’t be able to work and provide for my family. But sometimes God is listening, and He says, “Oh, you’re afraid of this? Well here it is.”

Multiple Sclerosis comes in many forms, my main symptoms are pain and fatigue. It’s a chronic and progressive disease, meaning you’ll have it forever and it only gets worse. Eventually, I had to retire from the investment world because I couldn’t work a normal week anymore. However, just because your body won’t cooperate, it doesn’t mean your heart and mind shut off. With all the new found time on my hands, I decided to give writing a try.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

If you try to become a writer, sooner or later someone will offer you this piece of advice. “You have to find your voice.” It sounds simple, but in the beginning you don’t know what your voice is. It’s sort of like love, until you find it, you don’t know you’re lost. I wrote two manuscripts that weren’t very good. At the time I thought they were great, but now I know they weren’t. The biggest problem was that I hadn’t found my voice yet.

During Covid I attended the Ink Drop Space Writing Retreat. We were in an exercise where the instructor gives you a topic to write about for ten or twenty minutes, and then you read it aloud to the group. We must have been talking about high school, because when she gave us a topic of, “Write about something you accidentally overheard,” and my mind immediately went to detention. I imagined that it was first period detention and today was the day of the senior prom. But Luca was a junior so he wasn’t going. His ex-girlfriend was a senior and he overhears that she’s selling her prom tickets. Immediately his heart is crushed. She must have bought them with the hope of going, but she didn’t find a date.

What should he do? She doesn’t know that he knows about the tickets. He could make believe he never heard anything and fade into the background. They broke up ten months ago and have barely spoken since. The idea of asking her to go creeps into his mind, but it was a bad break up. She’d just as likely kick him in the nuts as say yes. He’s a teenage boy, and the idea of rejection and people finding out about it have him paralyzed with indecision.

That’s about all I wrote in the Retreat. But an author I really respected by the name of Lauren Tallman, was also attending. She emailed me afterwards and told me I had the genesis of a good story. She said I should try to develop it into a full novel. Without her contacting me, I don’t think I ever would have kept writing the story, but that’s what happens when someone you admire gives you the right encouragement, it propels you into action.

After that, the words came pouring out of me. I had found my voice in YA Romance. When I finished the manuscript I brought it to a number of writing groups in Las Vegas to be critiqued. For the first time in my life, the feedback I was getting was phenomenal. I re-wrote it about twenty to thirty times and finally got to a point where I could send it off to agents or publishers.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

What happens when you want to be a writer but don’t know anyone in the publishing world? Since you know that I have MS, the concept of self publishing was out. I admire people that go the self publishing route but the task is so daunting and gigantic, that with my health, I knew I could never accomplish it. For me, it was find a traditional publisher or bust.

The path for a new writer begins with an unsolicited query letter. That’s a 300-400 word letter that hopefully encapsulates the 50,000-100,000 word manuscript that you just wrote and introduces you to an agent. But how are you supposed to boil down your resume, personalize a letter to a specific agent and then communicate the tone, passion, and creativity of your novel into a tiny, one-page letter that doesn’t feel like anything more than a glorified marketing piece?

It doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the only system in place. Unless you write a killer query letter, your big tome of work won’t get read by an agent or publisher. It’s called unsolicited because the agent didn’t ask you to send it to them, but supposedly, they are willing to read it if you email it along.

After you’ve done the best job you can with the letter, the process of emailing them out begins. Most authors will send out five to ten per day for a few days and then sit back and wait for the responses to come in. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a form letter back from the agent saying, “Thanks but no thanks. Although you’re a good writer, it wasn’t right for them.” I say you’re lucky to get this canned response because many agents today simply ghost you and assume you’ll get the point that they’re rejecting you. Sometimes you receive a personalized email response from the agent with tips on how to improve your writing, but it’s still a rejection.

You can’t get into this business unless you have a thick skin. There are countless stories of bestselling authors being rejected by tons of agents and publishers before finally being picked up.

So, what set me apart from other writers? I didn’t give up. There were many days when no one had the decency to send me a standardized rejection letter, I’d turn on my computer to find an empty inbox. Those hurt the worst. But I believed in my manuscript, I believed in my writing, and I believed in the people who told me I had a voice the world should hear. I kept sending out my unsolicited query letters, knowing it was a bit of a numbers game, and sooner or later, I’d find the right publisher.

Eventually, thank God, I did.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

There’s no such thing as an overnight success. Achievement only comes from one thing – hard work. We all struggle in life. You struggle, I struggle, the other guy struggles, but it’s how we deal with those challenges that define us. I’ve found that the creative process, or the artistic side of writing to be the fun or easier task.

The real challenge is how do you get the world to notice you. How are you going to market your art to the general public? Most writers and artists don’t enjoy that part of the path. Unfortunately, at least for the artist just starting out, it’s a vital ingredient. That’s where the hard work comes in.

I’d love to concentrate on writing and not focus on the social media or marketing part of the job, but it’s not reality, not if I want to be a success. So, on the days when I don’t feel like creating marketing content or investing a little money in advertisements, I have to force myself to do it anyway. I wish I could sit back with my computer and enter the world I’ve created in my books, but if I want to get ahead in this business – and yes, it is a business, I’ve got to put forth the effort and do the hard work.

And so do you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rhbird.com
• Instagram: @rhbirdauthor
• Facebook: @rhbirdauthor
• Other: TikTok = @rhbirdauthor