I am the only girl between two brothers.  The younger one was born oxygen deprived and has lived most of his life in a dream world.  The first thirty  years of it I took care of him.  Its a long story.  I’ll elaborate in another post sometime.

My older brother could have been a member of Mensa.  I was two when he started school and being the chatty little boy that he was he came home every day excited about what he’d learned wanting to do more than just express it, he showed me the abcs, how to read and write.  In doing so, he opened up a lifetime of tools for me.

The first books I read at two years old was the Bible, the Paradise book ( Jehovah’s Witnesses version of a children’s picture bible with targeted bible stories) and Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  An old volume that belonged my ninety-something PaPa Purcell.  (Born in 1879 I feel like I’ve lived through two centuries of knowledge about so many eras he love to weave stories about.  He was a blacksmith in the old west and inspired bits of my first two novels.

From the moment I began reading, this little songbird also began writing poems and singing little songs I made up from them.  I was so painfully shy I never shared those with anyone but they all heard me singing and I remember the smiles around me when I’d realize I was singing while washing dishes or tying my little brothers shoes.

We had a stormy childhood, little tidbits will appear in my posts no doubt in time.  I was abused in many ways but reading and writing saved me.  I was locked in a controlled world where I wasn’t allowed to have my own sense of self or freedom to be a child.  I worked around the house because girl did the housework and in a family business from the age of eight that taught me a strict worth ethic and two career skills that still behoove me even now.  Artist and Bookkeeper.

Writing is an addicton like any other addiction and I spent every penny I could get my hands on to buy paper and pens.  Wrote under the covers with a flashlight barely able to get through classes the next day.  I hid those stories.  They were my reality that I could share with  no one else and was terrified would be read by someone who could hurt me over them.  But if I hadn’t of written those emotions out, I would have died.  Because no child can bear that kind of pain alone without some kind of outlet for it.

I wish I could say things got better when I was fifteen and got my legal emancipation, went to work at a government sewing factory as a surger and finished high school at my own pace.  I took my baby brother with me.  He was thirteen, going through puberty and now on top of being slow, Schizophrenia was unleashed in his head and he still hears voices even with medication.  He also has Alzheimers, Parkinsons and kidney disease from being a willing test subject for medications that were experimental then but now widely used for people with that mental illness.

To say it was a scary  time and I had no clue of what to do and no one to help is an understatement.  So I worked, took care of us the best I could and got my education.  He was in and out of Austin State Hospital so many times I lost count.  I did all I could to make him feel loved and I was one of the few people who was never afraid of him, even when I woke up once with him straddling me with a butcher knife talking out of his head ready to kill me.  I was his mother and his lifeline even in his worst moments and all it took was the sound of my voice to sooth him, although sadly I could never bring him back.

He’d still be living with me, if I hadn’t created my own family.  He was so jealous of my little daughter that he attacked her when she was five and I was forced to put him in a half-way house where he’s been ever since in Dallas.

It broke my heart to let him go and it took years for me to relax and realize I wasn’t the only one who cared about him or could take care of him.  Those people have been a godsend for him and me.  The drugs he’s on now have given him lucidity, no more voices. He still struggles with being behind the world by about eight seconds but he’s as smart as my older brother if you just give him a moment to respond.

If writing became my emotional outlet, reading was my escape from the real world and when I started school I was that little kid with the arm full of books who could barely walk out the door there so many and I had read them by the next morning, ready to get new ones.  I think I actually read all the second grade Teacher had to offer and she went in search of more for me.   God Bless you Mrs. Frazier.

Its always been my dream to be a writer but I was too busy all my life taking care of other people to do more than work, be a full time wife, mother and housewife.  When I was 36 I had an emergency hysterectomy with complications and was laid up for six weeks in bed.  I wrote my first novel Singing Heart during that time.  It was a story I’d had in my head since I was five and I finally had a chance to bring it to life as an adult.

It sat on a floppy disk for years and my daughter read it when she was sixteen.  Along with poetry I’d kept in diaries for years.

Crystal died when she was twenty-four from Cervical Cancer.  She was repeatedly misdiagnosed and by the time they found out what was really wrong she had two weeks left to live.  She fought for and won eleven more  months with chemo and radiation.  During that time I was her caregiver even though she was a newlywed.  Her hubby was decimated and she turned to me and we bonded even closer knowing it was our last moments together.

She told me a few weeks before she died that she loved my novel and all my poetry and art work.  I sketch in charcoal.  She said that if there was a real heaven then surely one of the pleasures there was reading from a huge library.  She painted a picture in my head of her sitting in a comfy chair in a huge library filled with every book ever written on earth, reading forever to her hearts content.  Like her mommy she started reading and writing at two.  I made sure of it.

She told me that she wanted me to publish SINGING HEART before I die.  So the month after she died I went on Amazon and put it out there, unedited because I had no clue how to do that and I let it sit on a shelf there all these years until someone read it and loved it enough to help me edit it. Only a few people bought it and there were thousand of downloads when I gave it away free but only a few reviews.  Those who read it seemed to like it.

During those years I wrote SAM which is a kind of fictionalized version of my Dad’s childhood.  I lost him to Cancer six months after I lost my daughter.  I was lost for so long, too destroyed by the loss of my only child to do  more than go through the motions of living.  I could not write after that second novel, could barely speak.

Last year I came back to the land of the living and began wanting to live.  There were years when I prayed for God to let me go too.  There was nothing left in this world for me.  Then my mother grew ill and needed to be with someone and so we became roommates.  She’s in heart failure and I have nursed her through two strokes and heart attacks since November of 2017.

While I have been confined to the house every day and night for months on end I began writing and I could not stop, still often waking up with my fingers poised above the keyboard, sometimes I just reread the last paragraph and began writing again.  I have completed nine new novels that I have edited and am making book covers for, one of which I introduced on Amazon on April 22, 2019 called QUICKIE.

I changed my genre from Historical Romance/Mystery to one that seems to be flooding the market and selling like hotcakes.  Erotica/Romance.  I’m about to release the other eight novels in the next few months.  Beginning with the one I’ve been up all night re-reading and editing, BEAUTIFUL BEAST.

These are not BDSM or male dominance and sexual experimentation novels.  These are stories of people meeting in the oddest of circumstances and going for it when they feel that spark that only happens once in a lifetime.  The  men in these stories aren’t bad but they do have bad-boy fire in them and they would kill to take care of the women they are in love with despite themselves.

These are just the prelude of the novels that will be lining those heavenly shelves and Amazon, because rather than let ideas slip away, I am always inspired, I have started 46 novels altogether in the past few years and they are anywhere from 70- 380 plus pages  nearly finished.

I am shocked when people say they are only able to write one novel at a time.  My brain shifts in to so many gears no matter what interests me but when it comes to writing I am a druggie binging until my fingers nearly fall off and I have use Visine to keep my eyes from burning.

I have new ideas for books that I am longing to put on paper.  But I’ve been busy this past few weeks now that the internet finally came my direction.  I live so rurally it hasn’t been in my area for years.  I’ve been working on builing a website, catching up with FB and Twitter, actually began brand new with all of them and editing, making sure my books are up to par and designing covers with a program I am still learning to use.

Its all greek to me and learning so many things at once is exhilerating and exhausting.  I just want to write.  I’ve been looking for an agent and reading everything I can my hands on to find out how to promote my novels.  I finally came to the conclusion this morning that I will spend a few hours a day promoting and editing, putting out the others on Amazon.

But I’m going back to what I love most.  Just writing.  Everytime I finish a novel, I think about Crystal sitting in that chair in Heaven, reading one of them and laughing or crying as she turns the pages. 

She loved me unconditionally, believed in me when no one else ever did and I miss her so much.  Even if it only a fanciful dream, the thought that she’s excited to read the next novel, that she’s the reason I had the courage to finally put my words in to the world for better or worse, that keeps me addicted to the one vice that I will never give up.