My mother always told me I could do anything I set my mind to.  If I didn’t know how to do it I could learn.  Being a reference librarian, and a self taught one at that,  she was all for research.   Even with all the information on the internet, the library is a great place to bring the kids for a life lesson…but I digress.

One day in April 2011, I was having chest pains and ended up in the hospital.  Thankfully it was not a heart attack.  Unfortunately, it was a severe anxiety attack brought on by stress at work.  I was subsequently laid off in June, but again I digress…imagine that.

While in the hospital I finished the book I’d been working on for ten years.  This book, CENTAURI DAWN, I hadn’t been able to finish or even work on since the death of my younger brother in 2006.  I’d already finished one, TAME A WILD HEART, had it edited and submitted it to several publishers just to be turned down.  So now I have two books that are finished with nowhere to go.

I told my critique group that I’d finally finished CENTAURI DAWN and one of my CP’s said “now you can publish with me”.  Considering that my first book had been turned down and that I have no patience, I was intrigued to say the least.  I started researching the self publishing entities of Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.  Later on I’d add All Romance eBooks to the mix.

My CP’s went through the manuscript with a fine tooth comb and I must have read the finished product a dozen different times and found something wrong every time.  I hired an editor who went through and critiqued the first chapter for me then fell off the face of the earth.  I never did hear back from her and had to go through PayPal to get my payment to her back.  *Note to self, do not pay for services in advance.

One of my CP’s is in discussion to become a freelance editor for one of the big publishing houses, so I had her go through it again.  There were still minor errors which I fixed.  Then I went on to publishing the book.  Even after it was published, I found minor errors in my Kindle version.  What I’m saying here is that no matter how many times you read it, check it and recheck it there are still going to be errors in your manuscript.  That is just the way it is.  I bet there is not a book out there, that doesn’t have some errors whether indie or traditionally published.

Formatting drove me crazy.  It’s not as easy, especially the first time, as the companies would have you believe.  I ended up loading the book three different times.  The last one just to get the cover into the Kindle file.

This doesn’t even go into the process of getting the book published in paperback.  I’m not a techno geek or a Photoshop pro, so the process of setting the book up to the format they required for printing, especially the cover, was a nightmare for me.  I highly recommend having a professional cover done by a cover artist who is familiar with this process.  It will save you many, many headaches.

So despite all the glitches, the stumbles and completely landing on my face, I got back up and got my book, Centauri Dawn, published.

Would I do it again?  In a heartbeat.  Even if it meant going through the agony I went through with the first book, would I do it again?  YES!!  As a matter of fact I did.  I published my second book, Tame A Wild Heart, one month after I published the first book.  And made some of the same mistakes I make the first time.  The worst part of the paperback printing process I did avoid by using CreateSpac rather than Lightning Source for the print version.

Anyway, I did it.  I published my book.  I made my dream come true.  There are two books that now have my name one them.  I wrote them, they are a part of me, my work, my babies and I’m proud to have my name on them.  Whether I’ll ever make any money with them I can’t say, but I’m going forward with my writing and with my publishing.  It feels good.  It feels right.

Mom was right.  I can do anything I set my mind to.

One of the hardest things I think I’ve ever done is be the personal representative for my mother’s estate.  I will never do this again.  I thought I was helping my mother and I’m sure that I actually was giving her some peace of mind, but I will never do this again.  I will let another family member do it.

Dealing with family and realtor’s is the pits.  My mother was the glue that held my family together.  Since her passing, my extended family has shrunk.  We no longer meet for Sunday dinners.  Where we would have made time because it was at Mom’s or Grandma’s, now our lives have moved on.  We no longer have the time for each other and in some cases, have found out we don’t really like each other and were only doing it for Mom.

My mother was a strong woman.  We lost my dad to a heart attack when he was just 51.  I was five.  Mom raised four kids by herself.  Working for fifty cents an hour as a substitute librarian, she managed to put food on the table and by making them herself, clothes on our backs.

We were what the neighbors called poor.  We didn’t have a lot of money.  Our house didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was eight years old.  I remember when my dad was alive, we would bathe in a big metal tub in the middle of the kitchen.  Mom heated water on the stove.  We kids bathed first and Dad last, just adding more hot water as it cooled off.  I sometimes wonder now, if Dad ever had a really hot bath or for that matter one that hadn’t been used by someone else first.

I didn’t know we were poor.  We had everything we needed and even special things, like a trip to bible camp for me.  We had lots of extended family and friends and neighbors.  All of us watched out for the other.  Even though it was in the mountains and our neighbors were far away, we still watched out for our neighbors and they for us.

All of us take a lot of things for granted.  For the most part if you are able to read this blog, you are not poor.  Do you have a car in your driveway, food on the table and in the pantry?  Do you have friends and family who love you and look out for you?  If you have any of these things you’re not poor.  You may not have a lot of money, but you’re not poor.  I definitely don’t have a lot of money, but I’m one of the richest people I know.

How about you?  Are you poor or are you richer than you ever imagined you could be?

I attended RomCon this year.  What fun.  It was wonderful.  I met more authors and readers in one weekend than I could have imagined.  It was the first time for me to attend a function as an author and I was amazed at the camaraderie that existed between the authors and the readers.  There was not an author or reader there that wasn’t absolutely tickled to be there.  Everyone had smiles on their faces.  The readers were excited to meet their favorite author and the authors were just as excited to meet their fans.

The other thing I discovered this weekend is I’m old.  There were two young men there, cover models, with the authors whose covers they model for.  There was a time, when I would have been one of those ladies drooling over them.  I did with Fabio when I met him nearly twenty years ago, but I digress, anyway, all I could think of when I saw these two beautiful young men was how very young they were.

Now I admit that I’m eligible for AARP but I’m not dead.  What in the heck is the matter with me?  Well I’ll tell you.  I’m just not attracted as much to young men as I used to be.  Now I want a man whose a little older, whose been around the block once or even twice.  I want a man who knows what it is to lose a loved one, one who has traveled the world and worked out in it for people he loved and people he hated.  Someone who still has a lot to give but has lived in the world, like I have.  I want someone who had something in common with me.  I don’t want someone who is only old enough to be my son.

We need to let the publishers and editors know that a man can be more than twenty something and still be attractive to the romance novel buyer.

Just as I want my heroine to be older and wiser than the sixteen year olds from the early romance novels, I want my hero’s to be different, too.  Before it was a hero in his late thirties or early forties with a sixteen year old heroine.  Yuck!!  That just seems so warped now.

I still want a hero in his thirties or early forties.  Someone who knows what he wants.  Someone who wants a woman, a partner, someone wise enough to know her own mind and go after it.   Not a girl, just out of the school room, as they would have said in the old historical romances.  I want the old maid.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the six pack abs of the models.  They are fine figures of men.  Very nice to look at.  It would be nicer to have those six packs attached to a face.  Maybe even one with a few crow’s feet.  Or laugh lines.  And would a little, I repeat little, hair on their chests be so bad?  I don’t want it to look like they are wearing sweaters, but a little something to assure us that they are old enough to legally enjoy that glass of wine with us.