My Villain Origin Story

Do you have kids?

At some point, you have to tell your kids about your dreams… All your dreams, the ones you have achieved, and the ones you are sitting on. My kids asked me, "What did you want to be when you were growing up?" Of course, I wanted to be a writer. Wait, what? I wasn't a writer. I hadn't even tried.

I didn't know how to be a writer. I couldn't imagine. I had the internet, so I Googled how long a novel should be. I picked 80K because that was a nice round number. Then I thought about chapters and decided they should be about 2K. I reasoned that if I wrote one chapter a day, I'd have a book in forty to forty-five days.

Can you believe how naive I was? Except... there's a state called limerance. You know the feeling you get from falling in love? I was moon-in-the-sky-like-a-pizza-pie, out of my head, feeling all the feels for words. That first book took me about three months to write. It turned out objectively awful. I immediately shoved it into a folder with a skull and crossbones label and left it there.

I'll never let that first effort see the light of day, but I learned a writer's most valuable lesson: I could finish a book. I could start at chapter one, and skill be darned, I could write a whole story all the way to the end.

My kids watched me do that. They listened, they cheered me on, and they learned too. A dream begins with a bunch of tiny steps. First word. First chapter. First ending. First submission. First contract. First paycheck.

I'm not saying anyone can achieve anything. I'm not a New York Times bestselling writer. But I have been published traditionally and I worked with an agent. Now I self-publish. I am a writer.

I didn't sell the first book. I sold the second and everything I've submitted since, even if I had to spend a lot of time rewriting. Let me tell you, what a writer lacks in skill she can make up for in enthusiasm and great editors because I had no clue what I was doing.

It was gut-wrenching to tell my kids that I never even tried to achieve my dreams. I felt like I'd let myself down, and by association, I'd let them down too.

#Truth. I make it sound simple and it's not. It takes drive, a sense of humor, and friends who believe in you. It takes rigorous study, lots of reading, and relentless optimism. I've made mistakes on my writing journey. I've had bad days, bad months, and a concussion that turned out pretty disastrous.

I'm still here. I'm still in love with words. I've gone beyond what I dreamed for myself, and you know what? My kids gained an invaluable lesson, too. They know from observation that no one can achieve anything unless they're willing to try. I can help! Click on the Author Services tab to see what I can do for you.

Isn't it time you took your first steps?