Wow, I mean just … WOW!

I’m guessing if you’ve read here more than twice you’ve probably realized that the thing I like second only to spanking is writing. There was a gap in my writing. It stretched from the time of my last college assignment  until I was forty-nine and suddenly found something I wanted to write about. I found Bonnie’s blog, found my ‘people’ and immediately wanted to tell Cassie’s stories. They had been in my head so long.  As a teenager all the way through my forties, I ‘allowed’ myself to daydream with the excuse, ‘maybe I’ll turn all this into a book some day.’

I guess today is ‘someday’.

The fine people at Lazy Day Publishing accepted my first Cassie book for publication. It’s been a long time in coming. I could date it back forty-five years to when Cassie first came into my head, seven years ago I began her blog, three years ago I put the first stories together for a real book, and then for the last two months, with the suggestions and help of so many friends, I got it ready to send off to a real publisher.  Well almost ready…

If anyone what’s to know the true identity of Ana, of GoverningAna, I have her fingerprints – they’re all over my back! Yes I was ‘almost’ ready to send it, but she most definitely shoved me over the cliff, and I thank her most sincerely.

As soon as I hit send that afternoon I sat here and cried. I had a similar fear to what I had when I sent the children off to school. I knew my children were prepared and could call if they needed me. Not so Cassie, what if they didn’t understand her, what if they didn’t like her or Tom or Sue or… But I guess they did.

I don’t know exactly what all happens now, but I’m very excited and anxious to  find out. The expected release date is December and I won’t be talking about it much out here until it get’s closer – but trust me, when it comes out you’ll know. Oh boy, will you know.

This whole process, which is really just getting started, has all ready given me two surprises.  The first, no book will ever really be ‘ready’. You will never be able to read your work with out finding an error or something that you’d like to change just a tiny bit. I’ve had advice and suggestion from so many people and each one made the book better – I won’t list them because I would miss some, but I will tell you Bas’ suggestions really helped to get the first chapter pointing in the right direction and I thank him for that.

My second big surprise?  Many of you know that I always wanted Cassie to be a series.  In my mind I was hoping for maybe four or even five books.  Last night I began in roughest form to see how much material I had, stories wise, knowing many would be discarded and other expanded as well as new material.  I broke them up into bookish length. So how many do I have - between eight and ten! I was shocked. I wouldn’t tell LazyDay that right now, don’t want to scare them off. Can you imagine the amount of work it takes to rewrite and smooth these stories into real books?  It’s an enormous amount – and I’ve never looked forward to anything more in my life!

Just had to share my news!