On Monday I explained the reasons I was destined not to become a writer.  Other talents and activities.  Strange educational decisions.  No scholarly examinations of the written word.  And while all of those were factors, I saved the most important.  Like so many of us, particularly those of us of the female persuasion, I was told that nobody makes a living in the arts.  Unless we wanted to teach (fill in the blank here), then there was no point in pursuing an education in that field.  So while I had always loved writing fiction, on the rare occasions I was given the opportunity, I knew writing was not an avenue to follow. 

Forget that the short story class I took just for fun was the single most exciting class I’d ever taken.  Forget that later, as a therapist, the sheer joy of writing up my case notes should have been carefully explored.  Forget that I put myself to sleep at night with wild, exotic tales of other times and other people.  Nobody makes a living. . .

I was in my early thirties before I was mature enough to question why I believed something so silly.  I had fallen back on my years of piano, and was teaching twenty lively children while taking care of my own menagerie of three-going-on-four.  One of the moms told me that she’d submitted the first three chapters of a mystery novel and had gotten a nod to send the rest.

She had submitted chapters and someone in New York City was interested?  That happened?  I was as excited as she was, for slightly different reasons. 

Months later my husband came home and mentioned he’d met a woman who made her living as a writer.  Okay, she wrote fantasy game scenarios, but she wrote!  They paid her.  And suddenly, all the red lights I’d patiently accepted turned green, and I was speeding toward a new destination.

Sometimes change is that simple and that complicated.  I was finally old enough to question the wisdom of words spoken to me years before. Too,  I was finally old enough to say, so who cares?  I had nothing to lose.  What were a few rejections or even a thousand compared to the joy, the bliss, of sitting down at a computer and putting words, MY words, on the screen?  By then we were living in a strange new city (New Orleans is indeed stranger than most), and I had a new baby to care for.  But all that suddenly seemed like nothing.  I could find time.  I could find a way.  I could write.  And I did.

I started, as I’d learned to in graduate school, with research.  I read every relevant how-to book in my local library.  Short stories?  I wrote them.  Confessions?  Ditto.  A children’s story sold.  The $25 dollars I received in payment was my validation.  I could write.  Someone besides my husband thought so. 

I did the math.  At that rate I would need to publish at least a thousand stories per child in the family to get them to college.  And by then, I wasn’t going to stop writing, even if I had to move the family to the proverbial garret.  So it was on to novels.  At almost the moment I realized this, Kathryn Falk of Romantic Times Magazine came out with How to Write A Romance And Get It Published.  For me.  I was sure of it.  After all, that irrelevant education I mentioned before?  I’d studied what?  People, relationships, marriages, families, psychology, sociology, the American psyche, American culture.  Was there ever a better background for what I really wanted to do?

I wrote a romance, then another.  I found an agent (too good a story to tell quickly).  They sent the book off, and the next thing I knew an editor in New York was calling to tell me how delighted she was to have bought my manuscript. The skies expanded.  Angels sang.  I still remember exactly where I was standing when the call came.

Sixty-something novels later, the angels still sing, and I am so grateful that I finally questioned the axioms of good-hearted people determined to make sure I had bread on my table and a roof over my head.  But what did I learn when I finally realized I could and should write for a living?  I learned that we as parents, as teachers, as adults, should never question or tamper with the dreams of a child.  I told my own children that of course, they should pursue anything they loved.  That, of course, they could become astronauts or composers or Arctic explorers.  Even more?  I believed it.

I still do. Why wouldn’t I?