For years, I considered myself a painter, and in fact, painted often. I enjoyed painting, liked how it took me away from the world and let me concentrate on creating something beautiful. Creating art gave me a venue to show the world who I was, well actually more accurately, what I was feeling. But mostly, it let me realize a place in life. I was a painter.

But as most artists know, it’s hard to survive exclusively on painting unless you are very talented and quite lucky, and you have to be prolific. I may not have been any of those things, but painting was my outlet, something I believe we all need. 

Painting was my second job; working in the printing industry paid the bills. Please don’t assume I liked one and not the other. There were days and months when I hated being an artist. Nothing worked; the paintings were crap, childish, and lacked any feelings. Conversely, workdays could often be amazingly rewarding. 

Sometime around 2002, my husband and I started dreaming. He was collecting art, sculpture, pottery; I was a painter and a framer (by necessity) – a perfect match for an art gallery. And that’s what we did in 2004. I will spare you the details of that adventure for now, but when the market crashed in 2008, all hopes of a successful art gallery crashed along with it. 

At that same time, the company where I worked was sold to the industry’s behemoth. I was certain to be laid off, but, instead, they wanted what I did and so kept me. But they moved my office from home in Bucks County to New York City. 

Working in New York added four and a half hours of commute to my day. That sounds crazy and was. It meant being up before the sun – even in summer and returning home in time to have dinner at eight. Those hours left zero time for painting. Painting is not something I can do for half an hour here and there; it requires dedicated hours. 

So after not being able to paint for a while, my creative needs decided writing was the way. I had been writing here and there forever, but I never focused on it. Before we closed the art gallery, while waiting for customers, I started a novel. It was about an art gallery owner and his crush on the man across the street – go figure. It ended up being long enough for two volumes and it was terrible. But the process was undeniably pleasurable. 

So, on a train every day, into and out of New York City, I had a few hours it to kill. I opened my laptop and started writing.

The first things I wrote were from ideas I had had for a long time, many from a young age. I started taking notes on things I remembered, or a bit of a plot would pop into my head. One idea turned into a short story, which I loved at the time, but when I went back to edit the piece, there was no way to salvage it. 

Then one day, a friend left me a copy of an anthology he had read and liked. It was twenty-five short stories that all revolved around Rehoboth Beach called Beach Days from Cat & Mouse Press. Most of the stories were quite good; a few had captured me. And at the back of the book, there was a page stating that if you liked the stories and had one of your own, send it in for the next volume. 

Well, I wrote, and re-wrote and re-re-wrote. I came up with two stories, both exactly thirty-five hundred words each, the maximum allowed. The first one was called Stacy Fischer Can Dance The Tango and the second was Milestones. 

Stacy Fisher was a story of a widowed middle-aged man struggling with guilt, loss, and his identity, who finds help from a very unlikely place – learning to dance the tango in the middle of an art gallery on a cold and rainy winter’s night with a man named Oliver. The story was accepted and even received a Judge’s Award. Milestones was not accepted. Having at least one story published made the entire process worth it. I guess recognition of a piece of work, whether it be artistic or at the office, is a powerful reinforcement and I was hooked. I was so proud of that that I bought twenty books and gave them to everyone I knew.

I wasted no time and started writing a story for the next volume. I wrote three stories, a complete revise and re-write on Milestones, a story about a drag volleyball game, and a story about how sand drove a mother crazy. I entered Milestones, which was retitled Life Starts On Tiptoes and Drag Volleyball. I shelved Sand. They accepted Life Starts.

But all three stories only took a short time to write, and I found myself going back to Stacy Fischer. I found a spot that I should have corrected earlier. While editing it, for no reason other than I was still on my writing honeymoon, soon enough the thirty-five hundred words became ninety-thousand. I had a complete novel. I edited and re-edited Stacy Fischer a dozen times. I knew I had something there and wanted to be sure it wasn’t just me. Most artists will tell you that sometimes after finishing a piece, we feel like we just created our David only to come back later, sometimes years later, to ask ourselves “What was I thinking?”

I asked the publisher at Cat & Mouse Press her thoughts about publishing the book. She was kind and I believe she read some not all of the story, but it wasn’t right for her company to publish. But, what she did say to me was that if I would take chapter twenty and make a few revisions, she’d buy it for an anthology of love stories. This was not a competition. She wanted to publish one of my stories. Talk about thrilled. 

Since then, I’ve written a couple dozen stories for her Beach Read series of anthologies, one, Beach Thief, won third prize. I’ve also written several full-length novels, a few novel series plus a whole bunch of crap. I’ve even written several erotica stories, which I have not shown to anyone and used an alias for – even though I’m the only person to see them.

It’s been fun and I think helpful. I’m not sure that I could have survived the commute to New York this long had it not been for writing. Like painting used to do, when I write, I can shut out the world and live in one of my own creations. Oftentimes, things that are happening around me filter in, and sometimes things from my past surge up and find a place in the pages. Maybe writing is a way to settle internal disputes, come to terms with unfinished business or maybe it’s just about telling a story. 

If you are interested in what I have written, there will be (coming soon) a link to a page with all the finished stories and novels I have along with a brief synopsis. Feel free to take a look and comment if you are so moved. There will also be links to the anthologies that have my stories so you can get a copy of those as well. 

Thank you for spending your time with me.