Never fear! I’m working on A Babe in Winter. I just had to adjust the story’s priority because honestly, I wasn’t too keen on telling Mouse’s story at all, much less wrapped up in a quest. And I didn’t want the quest to become a series of vignettes, side-quests, and other such clichés. But now that I have abandoned Mouse back to his own mind, I can pick up where I left off in Black as Knight.

But this post isn’t about A Babe in Winter. It’s about an idea I had in 1996 and put away. And the idea I had in 2016. And the two in 2017. And the one in 2018. And the one in 2019. I doodled, knowing Idea 1996 would be essential to each of the others, which could exist independent of each other. But then I got to thinking: What if I put all of them together? Intertwined them? Set them in my favorite city with my favorite themes?

Fairy tales, myths, urban legends, angels, demons, gods, demigods, theology, philosophy, medicine, and science all coming together and conflicting, where they live in a world that views them as a little off, forced to coexist and live under the same bureaucratic restrictions as humanity, with twists and turns made possible because bureaucracy is unyielding.

Now, look. I don’t read fantasy or scifi. I could be reinventing the wheel. I could be trampling all over genre conventions. However, to me, this is a challenge: To write a world that may or may not have been written, explored, or hinted at with absolutely no regard to what’s been done.

It’s a world where the quasi-immortal mortal sorcerer isn’t the chosen one. He’s the help.

He came to Kansas City during Prohibition to get a decent shot of whiskey without having to sneak around. He couldn’t go home for it. Europe was at war. He only went to South America for one reason. He didn’t want to make the trek to Asia, Oceania, or Africa. So he stayed in the U.S.

He stumbled over a magical creature, then found an entire underground community he never knew existed, one that was starting to have legal and bureaucratic problems with the rise of the IRS and social security numbers: Papiere, bitte. He was asked to become the intermediary.

He wasn’t doing anything at the moment, he was happy to find a community that could expand his magical horizons and enhance his power, he was dating a beautiful lawyer for the mob and wanted to make his next family (#5) with her, so he agreed without too much thought to the long-term ramifications.

So now a hundred-plus years later, he’s a lawyer, stuck in a place he’d never have chosen to stay, becoming the locus for magical and mythical beings who need his help. There’s nothing magic about Kansas City other than Warre & Locke, PC, established by Wolfhart Tadius in 1930-something. He employs so many of the magical and mythical that his practice’s nickname is The Island of Misfit Toys. His only living son is ninety-something and sliding into memory care. His only living daughter is eighty-four and pissy about the fact that he’s forever thirty-eight, but she moves back in with him anyway because she’s tired of being the matriarch of her family. His mortal colleagues are starting to wonder why he doesn’t age, and everybody wants to know the mechanism of his youth and vitality, and where he goes about every sixty or seventy years.

But Hart’s not telling. That’s one secret he’ll take to his grave—when he decides to need one.

His current concerns include finding a missing Christmas icon because the Krampus is afraid her counterpart won’t be found in time; helping a newly widowed ex-faery godmother whose mortality is starting to catch up to her in the form of Machiavellian godfae politics; dealing with a frumpy middle-aged perimenopausal vampire with no guidance and no idea how she got that way or why; sniffing out a budding evil mage who’s tearing up the D’n’D world; keeping his community out of 4Chan and Reddit sleuths’ crosshairs; and struggling with a billionaire surgeon because of his tendency to exploit anything if he can make a profit and puts ketchup on well-done steaks. His grimoire is sorely neglected, his magic isn’t sentient so it can’t index them, and he trusts no one to transcribe his voice notes.

That’s not to mention the delightful and beautiful conservation and restoration librarian who specializes in medieval and renaissance alchemy texts, the first woman to intrigue him since his last wife died in 1960 and the first one to whom he might be able to divulge his secrets.

And worst of all, he still can’t conjure food that tastes right, even after over four hundred years.

He could leave anytime, but he won’t. Because he’s not an asshole.

There’s one dead giveaway your content was written by ChatGPT. It’s not the tone, it’s not the phrasing, it’s the em dash.

No normal, non-seasoned writer writes like that.

Sure, there are people who definitely use it. But 99.9999% of the population has never even heard of an em dash before. Let alone use it in their content.

Go die in a fire.

“I am in my prime. Professionally. Financially. Intellectually. Not sexually. All things considered, my sexual prime came in the back of a 1970 Nova and went out the door of a judge’s office three months later.”

I crack me up. I really do. Yesterday, I randomly tweeted the above out of one of my books that I thought was one of my better lines. That’s Finn Marston,¹ from Lion’s Share narrating the circumstances of his shotgun wedding at 19.

That’s funny (yes, it is; fight me), but the real story is in Lion’s Share’s opening line.²

In 1998 (I think) my mom, brother, and I set out on a road trip to Salt Lake. I cannot, for the life of me, remember why. I stayed in Provo with an internet friend, who was getting divorced from her asshole ex-husband, and her two single-digit kids. She was broke, her soon-to-be-ex wasn’t paying child support, and she didn’t have a job so she was on assistance. We had a couple of late-night heart-to-hearts. She had re-dedicated her life to Jesus, in non-Mormon evangelical Christian parlance. She was going to church, paying tithing (on her meager income), and had just gone to the temple to take out her endowment (fornication and adultery are verboten). She was wearing her garments appropriately and faithfully. She was focused, determined, locked in.

Fast forward a year or so. We were in a Mormon singles chatroom, and we were in DMs, chatting about her life. She was still broke. Ex still wasn’t paying child support. She was doing well with church and she was dripping with new zealotry.³

I had noticed that in the general chat, she was flirting with this guy from a state somewhere far northeast of Utah.⁴ I remembered his deets,⁵ and as far as I could tell, he was a very nice, decent, hard-working, spiritually upright fellow who loved his kids. Said his ex cheated.⁶ There were no warning bells as to his person. However, there were some warning bells as to how life with him would be:

• divorced
• paying a shit-ton of child support
• lived in a broken-down mobile home in a broken-down mobile home park in a broken-down small town (bonus points for honesty!)
• didn’t have a job
• didn’t have a trade, marketable skill, or defining occupation

Keep in mind: You don’t go to any chat room looking for a sugar daddy. Men with money aren’t there, they don’t want women over thirty and/or divorcées with eight kids, and moneyed Mormon men aren’t single anyway.⁷ I didn’t care what anybody else’s motives were, but mine was to find a nice, decent guy to marry and have children with.⁸

So she was chatting with this nice (I’m sure) gentleman, and I asked her very delicately WTF she was doing talking to a down-and-out dude when she was also down and out.

“He’s nice.”

That was a plus, but I thought she should be looking for someone a tidge more solid. Say what you want about a woman’s material target-seeking, but love does not conquer all, especially at the beginning when you’re thirty-five, broke, and have at least four kids between you.

I left her alone about it because it was not my business and she was a big girl and she was going to do whatever she wanted to do regardless of any wisdom I might throw her way. Free advice is almost always worth what you pay for it.

Over the next few weeks, she regaled me with the wonderful gestures this dude made. She was in luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuv. Nobody saw that coming, nosirreebob.

Then one day, in the general chat, this happened:

Well, that was alarming. I immediately opened DMs.

Oh boy.

The plan: She would fly to his state with her kids, who would effectively be their chaperone. They would meet in a hotel by the airport, as it was some distance away from his home. They would have 2 hotel rooms, one for him (I can’t remember if he brought his kids), and one for her and her kids.

Uh huh.

Ooooookay.

So she and her kids got there. He’d filled her room with balloons and flowers and just all-around romantic goodness. Normal getting-to-know-you IRL-post-internet stuff ensued … for about 1/2 hour. The kids got put in the other hotel room so they could make out. That was all it was. All clothes on, everything above the neck. I nodded approvingly.

“But then it just slipped in.”

… … … “BECKY! THE FUCK?!”

“Twice.”

I waited for years to be able to use that line in a story, but it never fit. Then one day I had a dream about a widow getting together with her widowed-father-in-law-turned-BFF, woke up, said (out loud) “Oh, that’s an interesting idea,” forgot about it, went about my day, which included a stop at Young House Love DIY blog, and an idea was born.

And fuck me if I wasn’t going to start that out with

One of my earliest memories is my dad holding my coat out for me as a gentleman should, and saying, “I can do it myself!” with all the irritation a three-year-old (or thereabouts) can muster. His feelings were hurt and he got mad and punished me with the silent treatment.¹

Then later, maybe I was about ten or so, because reasons, he was calmly discussing my attitude, which concerned him: “Elizabeth,² no man is an island.”

Oh, I understood what he meant immediately. It wasn’t like he hadn’t hinted at it before, but there were two problems with this advice: 1) the guy giving it thought he was an island, so WTF Dad, and 2) he really didn’t understand that from the very beginning, being offered help was saying I have no faith in you or You’re too stupid to do this yourself.³ I didn’t have words for this when I was three and I had no concept of social niceties because I was three.

Having to ask for help was even more humiliating: You were right to have no faith in me and I am too stupid to do it myself.

I started writing Dunham (that wasn’t its title back then) with a lone female pirate captain who got there on her own, and was the sole authority on her ship. She was a loner. She did everything alone. And she was a virgin because of course she was.

Anyway, life tossed me around somewhat and I started to see something: Those with power, money, or even people who just had their shit together, had support. Sometimes, lots of support. They had help along the way, from generational wealth and grooming to catching a glance of a homeless guy down on the corner that one time who gave you an approving smile and a good piece of advice. Nobody got there alone.

I spent 23 years doodling along on my lone female pirate captain who did it all on her own. But every year that passed, problems kept popping up, logical fallacies, plot holes.

How is she supposed to be educated when she just randomly plopped out of some hoo-ha with no guidance? How is she supposed to get a ship when she doesn’t have a pot to piss in and she’s “too moral” to steal?⁴ And, wait. If she’s too moral to steal, why’s she a pirate? That’s what pirates do, isn’t it? How’m I supposed to square that circle?

Meh, it’s my story, I can do what I want. I am going to shove that very big peg through that very small hole, and I’m going to do it by myself.

However, shit happened and by 1996, I’d stopped doodling on my pirate captain. It was a vestige of my past, my immaturity, my inability to bring my vision to paper because I knew I didn’t have the chops for it and had to keep writing books to acquire them.

In 2002, I got married to a wonderful man who helped me pretty much without me noticing, and by the time I did, I realized he did it out of love, not because he had no faith in my ability, intellect, or general existence. I acquired children. My interactions with other parents were … well, less than effective and pleasant. I learned. Mellowed. Maybe I softened. Learned how to pick my battles. Or maybe I was just tired of everybody’s shit and decided almost none of it was important at all.

In 2007 wrote The Proviso after an epiphany that I was going to have to chuck my idea altogether and rewrite it, which I did to my (mostly) satisfaction. Gutting all that gentleman thief, unworkable premise, stewpot thinking made my world and my writing so much better. So I very carefully opened my pirate captain files to reacquaint myself with the work. I had a vague vision, but I didn’t know how to fulfill it, and what I had already done would not work.

One day, I sat my ass down to read a romantasy wherein the main female character, a warrior commander of some military force was captured, leaving her troops in a complete mess. She had a second-in-command, but he was ineffective. This was addressed sort of, but only tangentially to point out that she was a wartime leader, but not a peacetime one. When I was younger, teens, mid-twenties, I would have felt satisfied, complete, whole. Yes, this is how it’s supposed to be. Yeah, so what if she’s not a peacetime commander? Those guys are pussies anyway.

It got me to thinking: What would happen to my pirate captain’s life’s work if something happened to her that didn’t actually kill her, and she was disabled or had to start over?

Oh, and then came the weevils.⁵ It was eye-opening. What’s this?! Pirates engage in subterfuge to win? They don’t just slug it out head-on like honorable men?⁶

My time living life, having a husband, having children got me thinking: We are a product of our time and circumstance. We do what we must. We don’t get anywhere alone.

And fuck me if I was going to allow my pirate captain to have an ineffective pussy as a second-in-command because she can’t stand to rely on someone else and lose everything she’s got if something bad happens to her.

She might be a lot of bad things, but she is not stupid.

I chugged along through my teens, wrote some RPF wish-fulfillment I destroyed because my dad found a book proposal² that disturbed him so he gave me an ultimatum: Let him read it or destroy it.

I destroyed it. Mind you, I’d typed that in triplicate with carbon paper on a manual typewriter that was heavier than the wrecking ball Miley Cyrus writhes on. Next, a classmate read an assignment and said with a very confused look and tone of voice, “This … sounds like something you want to happen.” Well, I mean, yeah.³

Anyway, I went to BYU and wrote more that was so treacly it embarrassed even myself, so I burned them in the sink of my dorm’s bathroom. I remember that very clearly.

Occasionally in there I’d spin up little snippets of celebrity RPF,⁴ but not often. Every scenario I could concoct was too far-fetched, even for me, but what was worse—I mostly didn’t write these down. I’d tell people. With great excitement. Nobody made fun of me to my face. Maybe they were entertained. Maybe I just came off as too unhinged. Maybe I just never heard whispers. I don’t know.

I was growing up, hitting all my baby writer milestones, doing what fanfiction and RPF writers do, only I was doing it alone, never knowing there were other people doing the same thing I was. I was nineteen when I met two girls who actively wrote fiction with New Kids on the Block⁵ in the heroes’ roles. By name. I sat there listening to their wish-fulfillment RPF, watching their excitement. I can’t remember how many emotions rolled through me, but shock, disgust, wariness, and envy were four of them. Let’s address these:

1. Shock. That anyone did this. By the time this happened, I wasn’t writing too much, and I sat there thinking, “Hey, I grew out of this a while back. These girls are my age. What are they doing still twirling around with glee?”
2. Disgust. I might be wrong, but I got the distinct impression that they truly believed their fantasies could come to life if they got close enough to Jordan Knight and Joey McIntyre to make it happen. I felt rather mature and level-headed by comparison, which is something I never felt. I knew the shit I wrote couldn’t happen.
3. Wariness. I didn’t know what to make of their enthusiasm in telling me this. I didn’t make fun of them. I was half entertained. Maybe they were unhinged. I didn’t know. I never told anyone else.
4. Envy. They were so free and open and unashamed of their frothy creations and their belief that they could make it happen if they got the opportunity. I wasn’t that free anymore. I’d been called on my motives and inspiration too many times, too seriously, with no mockery, not to have tamped down my enthusiasm.

Finally, I wrote a whole novel. You know, the one you shove under the bed after a while because you still had training wheels on. I let an older friend who was in an English grad program read it, and while she had issues with my lack of verisimilitude, she was very encouraging about my writing, structure, pace, and voice. Then I let a whole lot of other people read it, who said they loved it. Okay, good. I had a basis on which to continue.

I (mostly) moved on from wish fulfillment a little later and got good responses. I wrote stuff that could happen, but not to me. This is what made me better at this writing business. As soon as I stopped inserting my whole self into my work, instead building characters with bits and pieces of me I could portray with some verisimilitude, it all began to gel. I joined RWA. I went to critique groups. I got good responses from editors. I got two literary agents. Then shit happened and I not only stopped submitting, I stopped writing altogether.

Now, to my point: I established my voice and style long ago. I’ve been out of the writing community, that is, critique groups, for thirty years. I no longer have anything in common with new writers, or those who are HoNiNg ThEiR cRaFt, and, like my 22-year-old daughter explaining some Grave Issue to me Very Seriously as if I have never encountered this before or, worse, never actually thought about it, the endlessly repetitive questions on 𝕏 started getting to me because I don’t know what’s asked in genuine curiosity and good faith or what’s engagement farming. Maybe it doesn’t really matter.

So, instead of letting it irritate me, I’m going to use these questions as a springboard to discuss technique, da rulez, characterization, plot, tropes, genre, and any writerly thing else I find interesting.

Magdalene, the third book in the Dunham series, will be released on Sunday, April 24, 2011. This is the last book in the series with contemporary characters; book four, Dunham, is an historical and book five, tentatively titled Delilah, is post-apocalypse.

Delilah.

Post-apocalypse.

Polyandry.

Delilah and sisters Jezebel and Lilith, daughters of Duncan Kenard, granddaughters of Bryce and Giselle Kenard.

It, like most everything I’ve published, is an outgrowth of something I wrote in the 1990s that I wrung into the Dunham universe or cannibalized for something else in the Dunham universe.

I was all into it when I was forty and my libido was super-charged. I researched other polyandrous fiction and realized someone else did it better than I could, ever would, and mine would be seen as derivative, even though the added twist was that these people are Mormons, and given our history, i WaS gOiNg To TuRn PoLyGaMy On ItS hEaD. I don’t remember who wrote what or when. I just noted that someone else had done a good polyandrous novel, so I shelved Delilah.

It’s the late 21st century and a prototype chemical weapon is accidentally released (in Los Alamos, where else?). It was intended to kill selectively based on DNA (mitochondrial DNA?); its target was supposed to be people who trend to alpha, risk-takers, smart. It was not age-selective. Instead, it kills the weak. (Basically, it culls the US population for the best and worst, leaving not much in between.) It wipes out more than 2/3 of the US population, and what’s left are basically the barbarians. Further, it kills far more males than females. It amps up the males’ aggression and the females’ fertility. So of course, the Dunhams are barbarians anyway, but now they’re just more barbarous.

Pre-writing this post:

Then I went and re-read. Shit, I’m good. I was, even back then when I started it, in 2008. Well, of course, I’m good. I wrote the Great Mormon Novel™.

★★★

PROLOGUE

★★★

No. No, I’m not.

← Part 1

Part 3 →

We were at a bus stop in New Orleans where there was a girl about our age, mid-twenties, standing alone, waiting for a bus. We struck up a conversation with her. She was coming home from work or … something. Don’t really remember.

I asked her what she did. She said she was a chemist, newly hired by a sugar company, and her job was to find ways to make sugar not clump. Now, this was an interesting concept to me and I turned that over and over in my head for a long while.

Fast forward to 2013. I’m rehabbing my Spanish matador book that first got me The Call (you know, the one where an editor calls you up to make an offer)¹ and my matador is bored with his day job and wants to teach chemistry at a local university that won’t hire him because reasons,² but then he stumbles into a freelance job that has the potential to replace his boring day job. What he never wanted to do is take a regular chemistry job.

★★★

★★★

This is how a five-minute conversation with a brand-new young chemist at a bus stop while on a road trip with some friends in New Orleans became the major plot point of a book.

You never know what could come of the smallest, most insignificant experiences, observations, conversations.

It’s been seventeen years since I first published The Proviso, and a very hard ten since I put out the second edition. I can’t stop fiddling with these characters and I can’t stop feeling like I’ve missed something that will make the story richer.

My kids are grown and gone now, but not without a rough few years. Menopause has changed me in ways that have made me a stranger to myself—one I don’t like. My mother went through a medical scare that introduced a great deal of drama into my very large, previously drama-free family, which I never thought could happen. It’s not as intriguing in real life. I’m long past the pack’s age, and they are forever frozen in time.

I’m not sure I’ll write any more books. Menopause took my creativity, real life took my willingness to create trauma and drama for people who don’t exist, thereby reliving it, and my mother’s sisters took any security I had in my Dunham-like family structure and cohesion.

★★★

The current prophet/president of the church has decreed that we not refer to ourselves as “Mormons” or the church as the “Mormon church.” We are to refer to ourselves as “a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

I’m not playing that game. It’s deceptive and I’m not going to hide behind the name of a church no one knows. “Mormon” is shorthand for a cultural touchstone, and is my identity as much as “American” is. Also, you can’t tell a good “a Mormon, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar” joke with such a cumbersome mouthful nobody will grasp immediately.

Centering my characters’ motives around Mormonism allowed me to accomplish two goals: explain a thirty-six-year-old virgin (they exist—well, okay, they did) and put our culture out there accurately and hopefully somewhat objectively. I’ve been accused of making the church look bad, but it has its warts and I’m not afraid of it.

I have a blog post on this cooking.

★★★

I’ve also been accused of writing porn and I’ve endured all the usual derision that genre romance usually engenders. A family member called it “your lady porn,” even though they did immediately apologize for minimizing my work. I’m largely immune to this, but sometimes I get my back up and try to defend it. I can’t. I can’t articulate why genre romance is so different from Penthouse Letters.

So, on to something I saw the other day on 𝕏.

sex is nervous system coregulation and if you think about that a little bit you’ll be a hell of a lot better at it thank me later

That statement — *“sex is nervous system coregulation and if you think about that a little bit you’ll be a hell of a lot better at it”* — is actually quite profound, both biologically and emotionally.

Here’s a breakdown in simple terms:

### What it means:

* **Nervous system coregulation** happens when two people *subconsciously help each other’s nervous systems feel safe, calm, and connected*.
* In sex, it’s not just about physical actions — it’s about *emotional attunement, presence, and mutual regulation*.
* When both partners feel **safe, seen, and synchronized**, the experience becomes much more fulfilling.

### Simple analogy:

Think of two musicians playing jazz together. If they’re not in sync, it’s noise. But if they listen, adjust, and feel each other’s rhythm — *they create magic*. Sex is like that: attunement creates harmony.

### So, how does this insight make someone better at it?

Because it shifts the focus from **performance** to **connection**. When you tune into your partner’s breath, body, tension, or comfort level — and respond with care — you regulate each other’s nervous systems. That deepens intimacy, trust, and pleasure.

Genre romance in 200 words.

In our last episode:

I did my own first cover. It isn’t horrible, but it’s not good or representative of what’s in the book. I take comfort in what Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn said: “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late.” [Footnote 6: I wasn’t too embarrassed until a friend said, “I am amused by your creative use of verbs.” I dun fucked up.] I re-edited it and put out a second edition with a new cover (that someone else did).

★★★

That hurt. That hurt in ways I cannot explain. Why? Because I knew I was doing it when I was doing it. I knew it was wrong. I knew it hurt the book, the pacing, the rhythm, and in some ways, the story itself. But I did it anyway because demz wuz da rulez.

Or so I thought.

Rules of writing. These are the rules that get passed from one aspiring writer to another like a game of telephone, treated like gospel in critique groups, ignoring historical writing models or actively trashing them as dated and sloppy, all gleaned from that one conference that one time when that one junior editor at that one publisher gave a workshop about what editors are looking for, said something in passing, and the veteran aspiring authors engraved these rulez on golden plates.

One of many of these nitpicky little shits was “don’t use ‘be’ verbs.” So like a dutiful little writer type, even though I knew it was wrong and bad and ugly, I did everything I could to use no “be” verbs in Teh Bewbies. I twisted myself into linguistic pretzels to keep it from happening. There were so many unnecessary words added to get out of using a “be” verb.

What the rule intended was to eradicate passive voice. The heroine was plowed by the hero. No. The hero plowed the heroine.

It started in the early 90s and was the Big Deal for a long time. If my brief time in online writer circles (in 2007, when I got back into it) was anything to go by, it was still a Big Deal. “Don’t use ‘be’ verbs.”

Apparently no one, including I, got to the deeper issue of passive voice.

You know what? It’s totally possible to construct a passive-voice sentence using active verbs. I’ve seen it.

Now, I have only seen this nincompoopery passed around in genre fiction, not nonfiction or litrachoor. My friend who said this to me writes litrachoor and they not only fling “be” verbs around like parade candy, they construct passive sentences on purpose!

I knew it was wrong and bad and ugly when I did it and I did it anyway.

I dun fucked up.

BUT!

Because I self-published, I have all the control.

And when you self-publish and you have all the control, you’re never finished tweaking.

So I went about pulling that out of print, re-editing it, and releasing it again.

Were I with a publisher, I would never have been able to do that. Nora Roberts’s first book is, I’m told, something she would like to bury to the core of the planet. It fetches a mighty sum.

Teh Bewbies is still out there floating around. People love it. They see the flaws but they don’t care. It’s still people’s favorite book of all time.

Doesn’t matter.

I’m still embarrassed.

★★★

People want different things from writing a book. The first step you must take is to ask yourself: “What do I want?” and actually get to the rock bottom of the truth.

For many people, that is difficult. Too difficult. Some people (me) only get halfway there, but I freely admit I don’t know what I want most of the time.¹

So there I was with my cursor perpetually on the SEND button sending my manuscript out to real agents and publishers (not those poseur ebook publishers) and getting nowhere. Meh, I don’t blame the early rejections. My blurb sucked and so did my beginning (which I rewrote) and my tag line was apparently only appropriate for my blog.

I retooled and sent out another round. Meanwhile, I saw that an in-real-life critique group friend I’d had back in the day and had gotten published by her chosen publisher was talking up ebooks. Well. If she had no problem with it, maybe I should just peek. One night, after another long shift of medical transcriptioning, I decided to browse the poseur ebook publishers.

I found one whose blurb was satisfactory, so I bought it and read it. It was good. It was really good. I bought another one from a different ebook publishing house. Also good. A third, from a third ebook publishing house. Excellent, in fact.

Allrightythen.

After another spate of flat rejections, I started sending it to ebook publishers. Lo and behold, I got one rather complimentary rejection with several suggestions I implemented immediately. I got a couple of other complimentary rejections, and a few more. People liked it, but they didn’t know what it was, precisely, or what to call it.

That was encouraging, but it was still a wall. At least I knew I could still write.

Yet I despaired and my husband finally said (quite innocently) (it was cute), “Why don’t you publish it yourself?”

That sparked the REEEEist REEEE that ever was REEEEd.

YOU CAN’T DO THAT! IT’S NOT ALLOWED!

^{And that would make me no better than Judy the MT.}

He was completely confused. “You publish your cross-stitch patterns. You already have the skills to do it.”

THAT’S DIFFERENT!

I REEEEd for days.

The problem was … in between those very complimentary rejections and the odd editorial suggestion here and there, I was fiddling with covers and doing the typesetting to create a pretty galley. I kept that part to myself. It was my dirty little secret because yes, I did have the chops to do it myself, I didn’t trust what a publisher would do with it, so I’d already begun in the hopes I could say, “Yeah, hey, uh … could you use this cover? And this typesetting?”² I was halfway out the door of my church, but I was afraid of the heat I’d take.

“Look, do you want people to read it?” Dude asked me.

“Yes.”

“Then put it out there. Who’s it going to hurt?”

MY FEELINGS! MY PRIDE! WHAT IF THEY DON’T LIKE IT? WHAT IF THEY SAY MEAN THINGS ABOUT ME ON THE INTERNET?! WHAT IF SIMON & SCHUSTER WANTS TO DESTROY MY CAREER?! REEEEEEEEEEEEE

Then. Then. THEN.

He used The Words on me.

“Remind me who said, ‘The question is not ‘Who’s going to let me?’ The question is ‘Who’s going to stop me?’”

I should never have given him Rand.

★★★

NOTE
2025-08-25:
The second half of this post is a how-to and I decided to make it its own post. I’ll post the link here once I’ve cleaned it up a bit.

★★★