Oh Mama! What a long carpet ride.

The dream begins.
First time, as Heidi says, and carrying on slightly in that flavor of new beginnings, is that which you write. The manuscript. Things happen maybe for a reason, and our adventure here started with a failure. Fortunately not for us, but for the publisher who went bust, just as each of us was beginning.

But as sure as Mother Luck would have it, this fork in the road was just a fork so Cheryl Write, our lovely editor and mentor, tucked her little band of chicklets under her arms, and...

Off went we to market.

A writer/author must have as part of their inbuilt structure, a huge dose of optimism. A self-belief not only to dream but to pursue the dream and make it happen. That is scary. You bear the loads of whatever good times and bad times as you pursue the dream, the pain, the agony, the doubt, the fear, the inferiority, bouts of blockage, we went with hope to seek and find and found and...

This our first anthology in what will hopefully ensue, one of many.

We are in the process our next anthology, talking about the third already. Publishing is like that. Release date November 21/22. Ebook and May 2009! What a long wait and the galleys were finished a few months ago. But that's what this game is like.

The dream starts with the first chapter of your new novel. The characters form and you live and love them as you write. It's a long journey and editing is literally a pain in your rear, but you go through the process of the approach to the editor, the acceptance which according to your experience and your reputation, a process you approach as an 'if', or an 'not if but when'.

Once it's gone, your love affair is starting again. You get excited about the next project. Your old love affair comes back, first as editorial changes which you can either love, respect, loathe, dread, consider as interruptions, but must face. Then come galleys (proofs). All of them reminders of this old love affair as your novel goes through it's incubation. Your head is so into your next manuscript and gradually the release of your novel sits somewhere in the back of your mind as something exciting to anticipate.

And then the actual release date, like a birth, this dream is now out with wings and off to catch it's own worms soon. Out of that nest and your nest is full of the new batch of eggs to hatch.

I now have the release date to be excited about and I hope I never never take it for granted. That slight childish feeling - remember? Like when you are getting close to Christmas and the tree goes up with it's decorations and that smell of pine needles in the house. The shiny shapes that appear beneath it waiting for you like mysteries.

Waiting for you, my reader to share that vision and that love affair I started so long ago.