When I left the real world to be a full-time writer, I meant to be a novelist. I had a great editor, a solid publisher, a supportive wife and a writing contract with Rolling Stone, and an arrangement with Wired Magazine.

I set up in my basement, got two Labs, and spent the next five years writing, editing, and finally getting the book published.

It got lovely reviews; I was named a young writer to watch.  The U.S. invaded Iraq the same day my book – Sign Off – was published, and it sank beneath the waves like the Titanic.

Soon after, my wonderfully patient and gifted editor, Beverly Lewis – she insisted I was a gifted novelist and wanted more books from me – dropped dead on a New York sidewalk of a brain aneurism. My fiction was over.

Beverly was the real deal. When I came in to discuss my book, she had scores of pages laid out on a conference table, marks, and comments on everyone. That was how they did it then.

It is not how they do it now.

One day, I promised myself Beverly would look at one of my chapters or rewrites and tell me they were “brilliant, just brilliant.” She never lived to do that, alas, but I always felt the next meeting would be the day.

I realized quickly that I need some fast work to stay a published writer. I wrote a book about dogs, and a publisher signed me up for more. I could write about anything I wanted as long as a dog was on the cover and dogs were in the book.

Writing about dogs suited me.

I love living and working with them, and I worked hard to learn about them. As a dyslexic and a distractable person, I’ve always needed special editing and was grateful for it. My first wife, Paula, loved editing, she was good at it, and she edited my books until we got divorced.

She edited closely and formally, as Beverly had. Pages all marked up, not much praise.

My publishing editors got laid off, disappeared, quit, or fled the industry, and publishing changed radically. I didn’t want to write books any longer; I wanted to concentrate on my blog, make it work, and support myself.

Then I married Maria. She had no interest in publishing, other than I was a book writer and had never done any editing. She also didn’t have much confidence when it came to editing a published author. And she had her art to focus on.

But she trusted me and wanted to help if she could.

I decided to be my own editor, as challenging as Dyslexia made that. Maria didn’t edit my writing, and still doesn’t, but over the first years of our marriage, she became more confident and assertive, and I started asking her to read my blog posts; I would edit them as best I could, with the help of an expensive proofreading system that makes as many mistakes as I did.

A writer works alone, and I write some complex stuff.  As Maria grew into her own life, I saw how intelligent she was, how thoughtful, curious, and well-read.

She was not afraid to criticize or challenge; in fact, she loves doing that. She doesn’t go over my writing word for word,  but she has a keen sense of whether it holds together, makes sense, needs more work.

And she appreciates being asked. I don’t think she had a clue as to how smart she is until we’d been married for a while and started making and selling her art.

I was intrigued to see the wheel turn once more. Maria is nothing like Beverly Lewis and has no interest in poring over my every word. She gets the drift and catches me when I veer offline.

I tell people I don’t have or need an editor anymore, but of course, I do. I need to show someone I trust what I have written; it makes me feel strong and safe.

I like what has become of us. We support one another without taking over each other’s lives. It just feels good and makes me feel safe.

Maria has become more than the editor of my work; she is, in a way, a co-editor of my life, a task we perform for one another as we have worked through our lives and gotten to this good place.

I have always needed an editor. I have always been fortunate enough to have one. It is all about trust.

There is nothing more important to a writer than for him or her to trust an editor. I realized last year that I have come to completely trust Maria in a way I have never trusted anyone.

I also have continued to love her in a rich, growing, and deepening way.

When I finish a complex piece (like tonight’s essay on Amish women), I asked Maria to take a look at it. As a proud and committed feminist, I needed her input.

I left her alone in the room to look at it.

She liked the piece, made a few suggestions, and went off to blog. (Sometimes, she asks me to look over complex or emotional things that she writes).

She spots errors, sloppy sentences, sloppy reasoning. She challenges me to think harder, go deeper. But she rarely says more than a few years. She doesn’t want to get too enmeshed in my work, and I keep my distance from here.

We are always happy to see one another when we emerge from our caves.

Once or twice a month, some frustrated editor e-mails me about a typo and offers to edit my writing free of charge if I send it to them and give them a couple of hours.

I happen to love my typos and am proud of them. My doctors told me I could never write a blog.

I have become a pretty good proofreader, and my software program is learning to deal with me.

The people who e-me always surprise me. Anyone who knows much about me knows I would never entrust my writing to a stranger and send them my work to edit like it was some orphan without a place to live.

My editing is my responsibility good or bad, I take full ownership of it.

Writing is such a personal thing for me, and for most writers, my ability to show it to Maria tells me how much I have come to trust and lover.

Maria eases the loneliness of writing; even though she is in her studio all day, I’m in my study. It is just reassuring to know she is there. She doesn’t edit my work in the literal, Beverly Lewis kind of way.

She doesn’t mark up my pages with dozens of notes. She just says a few words, which is curiously, all that I need.

We just help each other out when we need to. And I appreciate that I have undertaken to edit myself in recent months, it makes me proud and happy to be in control of my writing.

This is a very new thing for me, a daily miracle. I realize that our support for one another’s work is one of the seeds we planted when we got married. Another is love; another is encouragement, a third is listening.

My marriage has taught me something about all of these things, but nothing tells me about trust than when she steps out of my study, pats Fate on the head, and says, “you did a good job, Jon, the piece really makes a lot of sense.”

It’s all I need to hear, and it means as much to me as it did when Beverly Lewis would have me 200 pages of writing with 50 pages of notes and say, “you did a good job, Jon, you are really learning. to write fiction.”

I would puff up like a balloon. I don’t puff up these days overwriting, but I still love to do it. And I love finishing it, calling up Maria and asking her to read something that “could be brilliant.”

Fifty years after Beverly, I still have never heard an editor say those words. And I’m beginning to realize; It is unlikely ever to happen.

I’ll have to be awfully good.

It’s a joke between us. I always ask her if a piece I wrote was brilliant.

“Not yet,” she says. One day, I think.