Today I Won

Did you know that today I won a pizza, found the secret to wrinkle free skin AND can get larger breasts???

Now that's a lucky day.

I love reading the subject lines from the emails in my spam folder. They crack me up. All the lines read the same, screaming out:

You are special.

You have won.

You want this and you didn't even realize how vital it was to your existence until you saw this email.

Well...maybe. Pizza and wrinkle free, sure. The breasts...I'm fine with what I got.

As a writer, I think it's easy to fall into the trap of needing to hear someone say you are special. And good. Some form of acknowledgement that putting your heart, your work, your missed family time that you can't get back...in short, your life...into something is going to pay off. That, in some way, you will win in the end.

And I, being perpetually unhappy with most of what I write, find it very easy to look to someone else to tell me what I haven't told myself.

Over the last year, I wrote a story that I like. It is different. I would even say special. Parts of it are good. And today, I sent it off to an editor. A very cool editor who might not even be a good fit for this book, but that I would love to work with someday.

So today, except for the pizza...and the wrinkle free skin...and the breasts...

I won.

It's all my Mother's fault

I recently realized I can blame all of my struggles and frustrations about finding an agent on my Mother.

If it weren't for her influence, I could write some very commercial, very fluffy teenage alien fallen angel vampire romance that agents would snap up and publishers would fight over at auction because it would make everybody millions. But I can't.

While growing up there were plenty of romance novels floating around to temper our teenage hormones, but they were bedtime reading. Something to fall asleep with that didn't require thinking. The reading equivalent of TV's The Bachelor.

Don't get me wrong. I fell asleep to many a romance novel plucked from the free box at the front of the library. But they had nothing on C.S. Lewis, E.L. Konigsburg, A.A. Milne, Dr. Seuss or Madeleine L'Engle. Those were the books Mom bought and kept on the shelves. Those were the ones that had me at hello.

Those and the small puberty books, with simple diagrams, which also found their way onto our bookshelves and substituted for my Mother's sex talk.

So I can't write fluff (or be Fluffy). I write stories that matter to me. So that I think, and laugh, and sometimes even cry.

And it's all my Mother's fault.