A New Commitment to Me

There's not much to say about cancer that is good. It's tough to put a positive spin on having a life-threatening disease. Even harder to find something positive to say about the treatments that put you near death to keep you from dying.

The one positive thing that came out of my bout with breast cancer was the realization of how really short life is. And how very little we truly appreciate it until we are told that we might not have it much longer. Like everything else, we only truly realize how important our life is when we think it's about to be taken from us.

I remember sitting and looking at the crystals hanging in my bedroom window while I waited for the effects of the latest chemo treatment to wear off. I made a vow to myself that if I lived through, I was going to make changes in my life. Important ones. Not like the New Year's Resultions that I'd been making and breaking for four decades. This time I was going to make a difference.

Four years later, I'm divorced and remarried and my ex is my best friend. We all still live on the family farm in North Alabama, but we started the herb and heirloom plant business that I'd dreamed of for most of my life. Our thirty acres of pasture no longer provides a home for beef cattle, but houses two horses, a donkey and eight goats (most of them rescued from the dog and human food market). I no longer show purebred dogs and now am owned by two rescues... a Heinz 93 (way more than 27 breeds swam their way into Lizzie's gene pool) and Buford the Big Blue Dog, a bluetick coonhound rescued from a Tennessee shelter (quite a long way from fluffy English cocker spaniels!)

Probably the biggest change I've made in my life though was ending my focus on non-fiction writing and writing The End to not one but two novels. And today am well on my way to finishing a third.

I never was a hot commodity in the non-fiction market, although I still get emails and notes from people who have bought my books. I was able to pay a few bills and make a few "fans" and meet a lot of wonderful people along the way, but... (and just like the one I sit on, that's a BIG but!) I was a square peg in a round hole trying to write non-fiction. I knew all the facts on my topics, and I am a fair-to-middlin' good writer. But I was bored to pieces.

When I wrote the first sentence of my first novel, I was hooked. I had created a character that I dearly wanted to have in my life. I dragged the writing of that book far longer than I should have because I just wasn't ready to say goodbye. Only after I started a second novel (thinking the first one was a lost cause and I'd never finish it) did I meet even more people that I wanted to get to know and was able to finally tie all the loose ends for my first characters and let them live happily ever after.

When I write fiction, I don't have to "think." I just shut my eyes (luckily I type by feel, so I actually can do the eyes-closed thing) and let my fingers type out the movie that's playing in my head. Sometimes my characters do surprising things and my eyes fly open and I'm prone to saying aloud "well, who the hell is that?" or "what did you do that for?" I've learned that it's useless to try to erase and turn my characters in a different direction. If I try the movie in my head does that thing that used to happen in the old Lake Theater in Guntersville when I was a kid and look like it's melting at the edges and then you can see the ends flipping in front of the bulb. The only way to get the film to play again is to let my characters go back to doing as they please.

I love making people laugh, and absolutely nothing pleases me more than to be in the room when someone is reading one of my books for the first time and I see grins creasing their face or hear them laugh out loud.

Then I know that I have fulfilled my goal. I have changed myself and my life. Whether it's all for better or worse remains to be seen. I have only this last couple of weeks dabbled my toes into the fiction publishing industry. So far, not so good.

It's scary out there! I made the mistake of joining several forums for fiction writers hoping for hints and tips. Instead I got hives and an erratic heart beat from all the horror stories. Big bad agents who reject manuscripts because the header was started on the wrong line, or the font was too big/small/wrong. Publishers who tie up a manuscript for months (years?) and then at the last minute reject them. It was with great trepidation that I took a deep breath and jumped into the pool.

So far the water's ok. This blog will be my record to show myself how I'm progressing. And, maybe someday when my books break sales records it will be proof to someone else who's standing there, poised on the brink of making a life-change, that they can do it too. And, maybe someday if my books are in the sales bin at Books A Million, some bargain hunting reader will Google me (or Bing me, or whatever they're doing in those days) and find this and see that I did try. And I did do my best. And I have no regrets.