How I got here

“Wow!  That was a lot,” I thought, after the first two, forty-five minute phone calls from my book support team. My journey was about to become intense - finishing my manuscript and finally bringing it to the query process.  Writing, marketing, creating a website, blogging, finding readers, READING!!! ... other people’s books like my own.  It was going to be a race to the finish in six months, landing around the time of my birthday, which struck me as, quite a gift.

But let me back up for a minute…”What the hell am I talking about?”

Eye-level view of a cozy writing nook with a vintage typewriter

I started the journey of writing a novel - my very first one - more than thirty years ago.  I just didn’t know it at the time.   You see, what began as a search for my past, became a very unplanned open door to my future.

I was looking for someone who could tell me something about myself.  Anything that made me special.  It was the longing of an insecure, awkward teenager who felt pretty insignificant, needing a feminine hero to model myself after. An idea to latch onto.

I mean, it’s one thing for your mom to tell you how awesome you are, but I didn’t have many mentors growing up an inner city, blue-collar kid in the 70s.  I had passion, drive, ambition and intelligence, and I was a pretty darn good student (and athlete, I might add). School was something I LOVED.  But, somehow, I thought none of that was enough. I wasn't enough. I needed more.

There weren’t many doors open to me back then. And I learned, pretty quickly, that if I wasn’t incredibly lucky, I was going to have to work overtime to get anything I wanted for my life.  My road was the latter. So, I turned to searching for a distant relative from my past.  A great, great, grandmother, who, I’d heard had DONE something quite extraordinary. 

Rose was supposed to have been a young woman in late 1800s Sicily.  She was very well educated, born into means, or nobility, depending on what story was being told, spoke fluently in at least 3 languages, and was the child of a family who intentionally changed their identity.  She was also unusual looking even for a girl in that country. Red hair, green eyes, olive skin, no freckles.

There were lots of secrets around her fantastical family history, which I found intriguing. But like most skeletons, the family was determined to keep them hidden. And of course, I was determined to discover them. Especially, when I learned about her teenage rebellion.

At 15, Rose found herself, engaged to be married, against her will, to a man who was almost 60 years old.  I suppose even in the southern Italian, post-unification era, that was an entirely acceptable practice.  But not for Rose.  Instead, as legend has it, she jumped out of her bedroom window one day, ran down to the seaside and married a young, local fisherman she'd known from walks she'd taken regularly there with her dueña (chaperone). For her actions, her brothers exacted a terrible vengeance upon her. But she fought back.

The whole scenario blew my mind. What Rose did and how... and that it was documented. Most of all, her courage struck a deep cord within me. She was the model of meta female independence I was looking for. So, I started my search - which, many years later, came to an exhausting and disappointing dead end. I was forced to let it all go.

But then something kind of magical happened. After whining to a friend one day, for the umpteenth time about Rose's story being untraceable, she interrupted me by blurting out, "Why don't you just write an (@#$*) story!" And it clicked.

I suddenly realized that I really didn't need any of the things I had set out to acquire in the beginning. I could give Rose a voice instead. Give myself to HER. Create a world as real as I wanted it to be. That's when it all aligned.

And so, here I am.