An Author Confesses

I've got a confession to make. I'm a fiction addict...and have been for as long as I can remember. I find stories delicious, and I collect them like memories. Some that I've read, some that I've written. Go ahead and mug me for my money, but try to get the last copy of Laurell K. Hamilton's Blue Moon from me, and we will have a problem.

I think the trouble stems from a happy childhood. Growing up, I was one of those annoyingly smart kids with gorgeous, loving parents, which, as you'll know, can be the kiss of death for a young storyteller. If not for the household presence of a minor terrorist in the form of my younger brother, I wouldn't have had any drama at all. In another neighborhood I could have turned to crack cocaine at seven years old and won critical acclaim by penning my memoir by the time I was seventeen. But trapped in a perpetual sliver of sunshine in the suburbs, I had to buy my slice of vice in a used book nook. Novels brought the whole dark interesting world to me, and I refused to give it back...ever.

I wrote for my own entertainment and still do. I have, at times, been leading an extremely busy and successful life, and I have wanted to... and have tried to... give up fiction. This turns out to be impossible for me to do, which is why I've come to label myself an addict.

Fast forward in time to a point when I'd finally given up the fight. I was obsessed with the thought of being published and was writing in blistering bursts, ten hours at a time easily. I knew the exact location of no fewer than a dozen bookstores within a fifteen-mile radius of my house, but felt that I would still be happier if Borders would put a Waldenbooks, complete with salesperson, in my dining room to save me travel time.

I was home alone in bed with my laptop on a breakfast tray, working on a story, when I got the call from a lovely editor at Red Sage Publishing. Judith P. was soft-spoken and very warm that morning on the phone. If Judith were tea...she'd be chamomile. I liked her immediately, even before I knew what a terrific editor she would be for me. She loved my novella, Temptation in Time, and she said Red Sage would put it in a collection of paranormal romances by the end of 2005. On some level, I had known the moment would come, but, when it did, I was no less stunned and no less happy to find myself once again in the now sometimes elusive sliver of sunshine.

Being published is a writer's Holy Grail, and I have found it. Cash could not entice me to cross the desert, but, dangle a publishing contract, and I'm off to shop for camels. I won't even complain about the sand, so long as you give me a saddlebag full of pens and paper and a couple of novels to read along the way.