From the moment I quit my job five years ago to freelance and have the flexibility to give this writing life a try, that’s been my focus – writing life.
It started out as blog by that title, where I wrote lessons and musings from my own life. It morphed into a website focused on the novels I write, each one a story driven by characters I strove to make feel as real as you and me.
And of the hundreds of reviews, emails, and general feedback those novels have received, the overarching theme from my readers is that I’ve accomplished that goal.
Some readers have said the characters felt so real they didn’t believe the stories weren’t autobiographical (they’re not), others said it felt like I had crept inside their head and was writing their lives (I promise, I wasn’t!).
Other readers were so affected by the characters they oscillated from wanting to reach in and shake some sense into these fictional women in one scene and hug them in the next – just the way you’d feel about that sister or best friend who you love like crazy but seriously needs to smarten up sometimes.
We all need to smarten up at times.
And we’re all the heroines of our own life – prone to making mistakes, succumbing to the things that make us feel weak, and then rising above them, crafting ourselves into fabulous beings it’s impossible not to root for.
That’s why I write what I write.
Not simply to entertain, but to inspire, to teach, to allow my readers to pull back the curtain on a fictional world that feels familiar and, through their time spent there, either learn something about themselves and the woman they want to be or better understand a real woman they know, with a new sense of compassion and empathy found from slipping into the ‘mind’ of a character whose way of being is different from their own.
And with this new project, Real Women, I’m taking that goal one step further – not with the women I create, but with real flesh and blood women. Amazing women, who are all the more incredible because they’re real.
These women are your sister, your teacher, your mother, you.
And my mission is to get at the heart of them, to show the world a glimpse of who they are, what they’ve come through, and why their stories are worth being heard – basically, why they rock!
Know a woman you think is amazing or inspiring? Who’s doing something cool, or great, or just has a story you think people should know about? Send me a message and I’ll consider featuring her on Real Women!
Come back January 30th for the first Real Women story.
(As a side note, I’m fairly certain through this process my creative juices will flow and I’ll get nuggets of ideas to inspire and motivate the novel-writer inside of me for years to come … What? You can’t expect me to turn down great story fodder if it’s just sitting out there for the taking. No worries, I would never ‘steal’ anyone’s story. I’ll simply be inspired by it.
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