I began reading and writing when I was two years old.  Someday maybe I’ll write a book about my solitary childhood and what propelled me to create stories to keep  my sanity.  Lets just say many years later, having led a very colorful life, it has always been my dream to have a bookshelf filled with  my own novels in print.

Yesterday that wish came true.  QUICKIE isn’t my first novel and definetly won’t be my last, in fact there are nine others already completed about to be published in the next few months.  But it is the first novel that isn’t JUST an E-book.  I ordered my first copy in Paperback last night and I’m working on formatting my other published novels as well so they too will sit on my bookshelf.

When I leave this world all I have to leave behind is the love I shared and the words I wrote.  I have outlived all but a few of those I cared for and all of my children.  They left too early in life to give me grands.  My immortality is simply whatever my readers feel when they open one of my  novels and I have written many genres perhaps to give a little glimpse of my soul on deeper levels.

I fell asleep last night around two am, writing.  Woke up this morning fingers still on the keyboard and started again where I had left off until Jewlie, my 12 year old tabby cat began giving me kitty kissies, hoping for her morning grub.  She has big Betty Boop eyes and a Betty Davis gravely voice when she chatters.  She was really laying it on thick this  morning buttering me up hoping for some Fancy Feast.  She eats better than I do most days.  Sometimes I go for days forgetting to eat or drink, lost in my own world.   I’m trying to force myself to be a little more social  not only to promote my writing but to catch up with old friends.

Writing is an addiction like any other and when I’m not living in a dream world I’m creating a new one for the next novel.  I write it all down as I think of it and sometimes I have many novels in different stages, such as now, just waiting to be finished.

Several are edited and ready to be published, just waiting their turn.  I love this part of life, even though I miss those I once shared it with.  The sorrowful part of growing old is outliving those you loved.  As you age it gets harder to let in new loves because there is just so much grief one poor heart can beart in a lifetime of letting go.

One of the things that keeps me writing is what my twenty-four-year-old daughter Crytsal said just before she died from Cervical Cancer ten years ago.  She loved to read the novels I had written but never tried to publish.  She told me that she believed everytime one appeared on the bookshelf on earth it would appear in Heaven too and I better keep writing and get published so she could read them all while she waited for me to join her there.

I like to think that she is sitting on a comfy chair, in a heavenly library, with her little dog Brucie in her lap, sipping a cherry vanilla dr pepper, reading the book I just put on the shelf two days ago.  I can just see that beautiful smile on her face as she turns the pages and feel her love across the miles of time and space.  Fanciful delusion or just one more mystery of the great unknown to be solved?  I’ll find out someday but for now it keeps me tapping those keys and moving forward in this world.