Writing, which words to use?

The writing of "Joe's Story: The Book of a Lifetime" and becoming a published author took a long time. From beginning to end it was a fantastic learning experience for me. The story itself was already in my head of course, but the way of putting it on paper was really muddled. The horrors of the Carbon Monoxide poisoning and resulting near death and amnesia experience were kind of tough to deal with again. Recording it in book form became a wonderful tonic though and brought me more completely into the world so many others may take for granted.

I am quite intelligent but my many areas of expertise didn't include the rules of composition, writing and journalism. Much to my eventual dismay. As a matter of fact, my ignorance and resistance to commonly accepted rules of writing may very well have been my undoing as far as getting on the best seller list of published books. Following rules is not necessarily a guarantee to writing success but it has been my experience that it definitely does help. As an example, every professional reviewer, except one, that has received Joe's Story for an opinion has refused to go past the first few pages. If they were professional enough to give me a response, (most are actually very rude and far to aloof to offer any reply whatsoever) they simply said they were not interested in that type of story. What a loss, they had a wonderful, true, funny and heart warming, memorable story in their hands and they passed it up. Their loss but I learned not to take it personally, it was my choice not to follow the rules.

Things that still evade my understanding will always haunt me I guess. its and it's, either and neither, friends or freinds, affect or effect, just where to put a : or a ; , climbed or clumb, you know, stuff like that. The questions of this weekend are naturally save or saved, thief or angel, heaven or hell. I wonder how I could write about them? It's already been done though anyway, I'll just leave it at that....Happy Easter1