The Journey Begins

My first thought was to title this entry “Why The Hell Am I Writing A Blog?” Not the most inviting title, sure, but it’s a legitimate question. Why a blog? And a website? And an additional Facebook page? What am I thinking?

Well, it’s all coming about as the result of a recent development in my life. I began writing fiction a long time ago. Not as a kid, like so many authors claim, but later. After school, marriage, jobs, childbirth, but still, a long time ago--so long ago in fact that the governor of Texas was a Democrat. In the years since, I’ve been toiling away in a relatively deep silence while doing other, more visible, things. My writing has always come in spurts, periods of productivity followed by fallow months, sometimes fallow years. Lots of reasons for this, some more legitimate than others, but through it all I’ve always considered myself a writer. I didn’t need affirmation to make it so.

Then, a few months back, affirmation arrived in the form of Laura Rothschild, the insightful, supportive, occasionally irreverent literary agent who is one-half of RO Literary. When she and the other-half of RO Literary, Sandra O’Donnell (another great agent and human being) read my novel, they fell in love with it, and I was all too happy to accept their offer of representation. Up until now, the group accompanying me on my writing journey has been pretty small: my husband John and two beloved off-spring, Hannah and Jake, who always have been unfailingly supportive; my writing tribe, a group lovingly referred to as the Fabs, the core of which coalesced in a workshop led by Karen Stolz, a talented teacher and writer who passed from this world far too soon; and more recently, the Bubble Sisters, a couple of writing compadres with whom I happily gather to critique, commiserate, and drink all manners of sparkling wine. Now, with Laura, Sandra, and RO Literary also by my side, the path toward publication is becoming more of a reality. It may take a while, but things are moving forward, and that’s a good thing.

The novel (not my first, but my first worthy of seeing the light of day) is currently titled Nowhere To Go But Everywhere. John deserves credit for the title. He found it in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road: “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” This is a great title for this book—evocative, meaningful, and so much better than the four or so previous ones I’d come up with. There’s always the possibility that the title may be changed prior to publication, and if it happens, it happens, but I’m lighting candles in hopes that it doesn’t. Feel free to light some candles of your own.

My plan is to use this blog to share more about the book, more about writing, more about publishing. For now, though, I’m going to start out slow and easy, blogging about things that interest me, things I hope you enjoy reading. Some of it will be writing related, a lot of it probably not. Whatever I post, I assure you it won’t be all about me—that would bore me far more than it would bore you, and I imagine it would bore you a great deal. I promise that I will do my best to make this journey an interesting one for all of us. Thanks for joining me!