2 Year Anniversary!~

Two years ago, on April 3, 2022, my debut novel Summer Heat was released on the Zon.

Two years ago, I finally accomplished something that had been on my bucket list before I even knew what a bucket list was.

Now, don't go thinking I got it right or that this book is perfect. She's far from it. There are a lot off little things that I would change if I could. Steps along the way that I didn't know to take. People who screwed me over and broke me along the way.

And yet. There she is.

Or was. I did have to pull her after a bit because she needed some work. But that's fair. I'm not ashamed to admit that my first book wasn't an NYT best seller or anything. She was the book I needed to write in order to have faith that I was capable of doing this huge, massive, scary thing that I had always dreamt of doing.

Someday I'll write out the entire process of how Summer Heat came to be, but for today, I just wanted to commemorate my 2 year publish-aversary!

And to those of you thinking: I'd love to do that but (insert self-sabotaging thought), let me just remind you of a few things.

• I will be 39 this summer. That means I was 36 when I published my first book. I was 34/35 when I started writing her.

• I have two kids who were 3 and 6 when I started the process.

• My eldest was just starting full day school and my youngest was in half day school.

• The baby had speech delays and was basically nonverbal at the time, which is a stress beyond most anything I've dealt with in my life (before or since, honestly). Have you ever seen the movie Mr. Holland's Opus with Richard Dreyfuss? There's a scene where he's fighting with his wife about whether or not to send their deaf child to a school that specializes in educating deaf and hard of hearing persons. He's concerned about the costs. She's trying to talk to him while their child is trying to tell her he wants something. They can't figure it out. They child screams and stomps and has a fit. The mom ends up stomping her feet and yelling "I just want to be able to talk to my son!" I felt that way every day for four years. And I was in the thick of it when I started writing Summer Heat.

• C19 was still in the scary stage when I started writing. Little bits here and there but the big chunk was written during the end of the second year, when people were getting very vocal on their stances with the virus and subsequent medical practices. I know even in my own extended family, there were strong opinions.

There were boundaries after boundaries that I could have let stop me, or even just slow me down. But in the end, I did it. I published a romance novel that no one had ever read before. Because the story was mine to tell.

If you feel like this, if there's a part of you that you wish you could live out. Something about you that feels unique to only you. Something that feels so much like it's a part of you and yet trapped... I say "Go. Do it. Do the thing."

And if you want to say "I'm scared," my response to that is:

Do it anyways!

Do it Scared!

Life isn't about waiting for the right time. It's about being true to yourself, which will always be the right time.