It's funny how some mornings I struggle for a topic to post. It's funny because I do this for my own edification. It's not like anyone is reading it and grading me. I do this because I am a writer and I love the sound of the click-clack of the keys and I love to watch the letters dancing across the screen in front of me. I love reading my own words and I love when my words are being read by someone else. There probably isn't anything about writing that I don't like. Except maybe the struggle.

The struggle of actually writing is hard to explain. Since I published my first novel I've been struggling with a follow up. Some said I should do a sequel but I really wanted to be around some new characters. I started a second novel last year and made some decent progress. Than my real life interrupted the process and now my characters, Olivia and Hank, are kinda just sitting around waiting for me to do something. Actually, I believe Olivia is lying in the hospital and Hank just flew in from Vegas to be by her side. Sorry guys.

I had a routine when I wrote Raymond's Daughters. That routine meant getting up every morning at 4:30 and writing for more than an hour before work. The house is quiet then and that is the only way I can write. In complete silence. Raymond's story was begging to be told so even on the mornings when I did not want to get out of the bed I did. I was a woman possessed.

After eight months of writing I had to have the book edited and then I had to deal with the rewrites. Which were absolutely horrible. I took offense when an editor told me to change this or that. Some things I changed -- others I didn't. In order to be published traditionally one must have an agent. There is no trick to it. There is a literary agent on every corner in Manhattan. The challenge comes when you try to convince a total stranger that they should take an interest in your project. Keeping in mind that they receive hundreds, no thousands of inquiries each week. Needless to say, I have a stack of rejection letters that would choke a horse. One of the first rejections I received was especially painful because it wasn't a form letter. It had come from an agent who read the first three chapters of my book and then requested that I forward the entire manuscript. I received a neatly typed personal letter from a woman that had actually read my work and rejected it. The others may have read the synopsis and turned it down, which didn't hurt as much because I rationalized that if they would have given it a chance they would have loved it. Well, I came across someone who had given it a chance and she didn't love it.

I had to find some way to move past that. I realized that everyone is not going to love everything that I write. That's cool. Some writers write for the audience. I truly write for myself and if someone appreciates what I do that's wonderful. If not, that's wonderful too. That's coming from my internal frame of reference. I rely only on myself for validation. It's a great way to live. I discovered that my purpose for writing Raymond's Daughters was not to get on anyone's best-seller list. My purpose was two-fold: (1) to get this story down in the form of a published work and (2) to have someone that I didn't know read it and tell me that it was good. I've accomplished both those things so I'm sitting fat and happy.

To date, I have not broken any sales records. There are many copies in homes all up and down the east coast, a few in the midwest and a couple in California (thanks to Amazon). Yes, and I even sent one to Oprah. I haven't heard anything from her yet. I plan to publish a compilation project entitled, Confessions of a Beautiful Woman which will include my poetry and essays. This is a great way to get another publication under my belt while I continue struggling with my second novel.