In which I don't whine

More than one person has mentioned to me recently that they read my blog because I don't complain. (I tried once. I wrote a scathing, shimmering, incandescently enraged blog entry last month when I was so angry I wanted to kick a few people with pointy shoes until the streets ran red with their hearts' blood. But I got over it and it just seemed silly to leave the entry in the publishing queue when I was no longer wanting to torch their houses, bulldoze the remains, and salt the earth so nothing would ever grow there again. I jest!)

Anyway, in light of those observations about the character of my blog, I started thinking about the mood of this place and how closely it reflects what's really going on in my head. I decided this blog is completely me, but me at about 80%. (I censor. A LOT.) But--without compromising the privacy of people who didn't ask to have their personal lives hung out on the washing line of the internet--it is as authentic as I can make it. I really do muse about the things I write here, and I enjoy writing things that I think YOU will enjoy.

But more than that, I am acutely aware of the power of gratitude. (Warning: New Age feeling-type sentiments ahead.) I always believed I would be a published writer. Even as a child, I would practice my autograph or being interviewed by Barbara Walters because I knew those skills would come in handy one day. What I didn't expect is that it would take me almost until the age of forty to get published. I was twenty-three when I wrote my first novel, and it was fourteen years until I got a book deal. Fourteen years of rejection letters and writing novels that nobody wanted. My confidence and my faith in myself as a writer were beaten so thin moths could have used them for wings. It was, simply put and without melodrama, a dark time.

It hurts to think about it now, so I try not to. But when I do, I am knocked to my knees by gratitude for what I have. My reality now is that every day I can walk into a bookstore and see my work, printed and bound and for sale, ready to go home with someone and hopefully give them a pleasurable escape from their workaday life. My reality now is that I get on airplanes and travel to wonderful places to meet people who believe in what I do and want to help make me successful. And my reality now is that every single morning, I turn on my computer and there is e-mail waiting for me from readers who say things like, I hope your well is ever plentiful and you always find joy in your words.

So that's why I don't complain here. This is the place where readers come to meet the real me, and what you find here IS the real me. But it's the best me. I put on a pretty party dress and my dancing shoes because I know you're coming and I'm happy to see you here. So thanks for coming, and thanks for appreciating what I do. Because without you, I am a girl with eight lonely little novels in a box under her bed, and I never forget that.