You know when all of a sudden all these things converge at once and kind of spin your world on its axis a bit with the way they all play into one another to give you some sort of epiphany? That was this past week for me. All of these things happened so close together that made me think about the business of writing. Which doesn’t mean writing as a thing that keeps you busy; it means what it means to decide you want to be a capital-A Author, a person who makes this a full-time, this-is-my-life career.

For a really long time, I didn’t. I refused to show anything I wrote to anyone. The only reason I even queried when I did, after so many years of writing, is because my husband had just started law school and we were broke and I felt like I should try something