Once again, I'm sorry...

Depression has left me without energy to write anything or even edit. And I've had computer trouble; it really needs to go to Best Buy so the Geek Squad can clean it up and get it running happily again. But that's 100 dollars! I do have half of that hidden away, but I have to get the other half, plus I'd say $25 more just in case a repair is needed.

And then, I didn't have enough money to do a full winterizing and tune up on the car because our Dividends were cut in half and i had to use 200 - 100 on the car at another shop to get it aligned and found out it couldn't be done because the ball joints are worn out. I can still drive it, I just have to raise a good $600 for parts and $400 for replacing them, sigh... somehow I'll make it. And then the holidays are coming and I need $60 for three precious granddaughters.

So about my writing...

After my husband destroyed 5 novels by burning them, I had a mental breakdown and couldn't write for a long time. We finally got divorced in August 1993, almost 15 years I'd spent with that abusive asshole because of what the church we were in, and biological families' beliefs. But now I had a house to babysit, 2 shelters I could go to and then a tiny 9x9 bedroom in a double-wide trailer, and be the family's slave in return. I was on the housing list and i bugged them. Boy, I bugged them. Called 3x a week to ask where I was on the list. Between all this I was learning to type at a training program and I loved it! When I got back to the house of "we are christians, we go to church but we sin constantly because god will forgive us" people, we would lock ourselves in the little room and watched TV, read or went to bed. When I got the "Yes you got it", we were ecstatic  and I knew just what to do and where to go. I had been in touch with the landlady and she said yes, they take housing. So we moved in, the kids went to school, one across the street, one a mile and a half down the road.

I started getting ready to go to college. Social Services was the closest to what I had wanted to do. In the meantime, I was working on a series that had been one book only until a friend told me it should be a series. Good ol' Steve Walls, He and his wife were my safe house when my husband got violent. I'd just take Glori on one arm, take Matt's hand and we'd walk out the front door to their house, a block and a half away, no matter what the weather was. My husband would come over in a few minutes but Steve, a Master Sgt., would talk to him at the door and tell him they's send us home when he could be nice, and shut the door in his face.

Then I started having a dream that about drove me nuts! This commercial played a short riff of a musical song that I had never heard before and it got stuck in my head! I went to bed that night with the dumb song still ringing in my skull. 

That night a story played out in my head: a woman, dressed in all black - pants, shirt, vest, jacket, socks and shoes too was out-of-her mind in anger at the priest who lived in the village, as he had forced sex from all the village, even the adults, and had killed the man when catching him raping a boy. She had the villagers set up a pole and wood for burning the body and everything of his. Watching her so upset sparked something in the boy's mind, for her suddenly able to tap into the lady's computer and put on the piece of music I'd heard. Then he and the lady danced, she picking him up and swinging him, I woke up and hurried to my desktop PC and wrote it all down, Now I had a story to write and a song to find. Doing what I could, I called each television station and found the person to talk to, but no one seemed to know. For days and days I made calls, and then one day it happened. I made the call just as the commercial played and asked; one person knew which song it was and told me.

"That's ,Music Box Dancer" he told me and I thanked him so much and ran for my computer again. I had a P2P program on it and it came up with 5 variations, and I downloaded them all. When I listened to it, I was ecstatic! I played all 5, picked my favorite (there were 2, and here's one - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=music+box+dancer+by+frank+mills)  and kept dreaming of the woman and child I had. It was easy to dream of them; I just went to sleep actively thinking of them. When I woke up, I kept talking about my dream and put it  down.This  book (still unpublished, it needs a cover and to be edited in the Kindle edition, a huge job) is called "The Long Trip Home." It's been edited for content several times and a couple for spelling, so when I put it into Kindle, I'll ck spelling too.

But my series was never far from my mind. I kept thinking about it too. I worked back and forth between the two novels, finished the second one and put it away while i finished my work on #2. But now I had created a bad habit; putting down one novel to work on another. I knew it was a bad habit, but what else could I do? I might lose the work that popped into my head! So I worked back and forth, and wrote several novels in between. I finished the 9th book in the series in 2010, all done with the book and began looking for publishers that would take all nine. I had seen series pop up all over the place, so if that was happening, why couldn't mine? I made applications, following the rules - and got rejection papers like a flood roaring down the dry creek bed. Discouraged, I went back to writing and got some work done. But I needed Beta Readers to read the books and help me.... more about that the next time I write, hopefully not that far from now.

I love you my readers, I love all of my friends, you know who you are! extra MWAH's for friends because they are family! Have a great weekend!

Hugs!!!