When I left corporate America and became a full-time writer, I thought, “Wow how cool, all my time just for writing!” Ideas for stories, novels, essays, and poems jumped around in my mind like caffeinated fleas.

And then I began ghostwriting. I write for other people, and I love it. However, there is a downside. I’m often so busy writing for others that my own work takes second place. Ghostwriting earns me reliable money. Making money from my own work is more of a crap shoot. Ghostwriting means I have made commitments and promises to other people. With my own writing, the commitments and promises are made only to myself, who I find easier to negotiate with.

The upshot is that many of my fleas have stopped jumping and gone back to sleep.

So what to do? One day I had a brainwave. One of the commitments to myself that I do keep steadfastly is to write this blog. I’m not writing for others here, this is my own work. So what if I shared here, on this blog, pieces from my current “for-me” WIP?

Right now I’m working on a novel with the working title of “Masks & Stories”. It’s about the masks we wear and the stories we tell, and how they make us who we are. I like it. I like it very much. When I work on it, I get excited. And when I share it, it becomes real.

So every now and again I’m going to share snippets of this WIP here on my blog. Maybe just a sentence or a paragraph at a time. This is kind of scary, since these will be first draft snippets; they are unedited, will probably change, or may even be eliminated from the final product. But I believe that sharing these snippets will keep me trucking along on this book that is crying out to be written. I think it will keep my fleas hopping.

I’ll start at the beginning, with the first paragraph of the book (as it is now). If you want to comment, I’d love to hear what you think.


“We opened the door and trooped eagerly into the house, just like we always had before. But we stopped in the entry way, the four of us bunched together as if uncertain of where to go, since Grandma wasn’t here to show us. Only a moment, but a long one, while her absence shouted from the walls and echoed in the empty air.”


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