by Janis Patterson

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Small wonder we’re all confused.

I am a writer… and that was not a conscious decision. I am the third (or fourth, or perhaps even fifth – the family history is sometimes a little vague) generation of a wordsmith family. Writers, teachers, editors… they festoon the branches of my ancestral tree like sweet fruit. Obviously I didn’t have a chance to be anything else, as words are encoded into my DNA.

At the age of four I wrote – and illustrated and published, using a #2 pencil, typing paper and white sewing cotton to stitch it all together – my first book, of which the entire family was very proud. It was a timeless tale of several children walking home from school through the park where they captured a lion which had escaped from the zoo and still got home in time for dinner. I had a melodramatic imagination even then.

So – you’d think with such a strong genetic disposition and a supportive family by now I’d be on the top of the writing heap, wouldn’t you? Consistently on all the best seller lists, two major book tours a year, lots of tv interviews, maybe even a castle in France… Didn’t work that way. Even with over 60 books to my credit (there are more, but we don’t talk about them) I’m still clinging by my fingernails to the bottom of what used to be called the mid-list.

So what happened? In a word, Life. While I will pit my wordsmithing skills against any and all, Life – sometimes called the blind villain – does happen. After selling my first two novels (New York was all there was in those days) I fell in love and followed a false path that did not end well. When I came back to writing the editors I had known had found other pets and though I still had a good reputation and could of course write very well, I had to forge new relationships.

I sold a few more books, then my father entered the lengthy downward spiral of his final illness. As there was only my mother and me and both my parents were then considered almost elderly, I spent more and more time helping her with his care and writing slipped to a less and less important position in my life. Then when he finally passed away there was another half year of keeping my mother together. They had been a very devoted couple.

My editors had been very kind and understood my problem and tried to work with my situation, but we both knew they had slots to fill and schedules to follow and services to coordinate… and while the door was never closed to me, it swung to a very narrow entrance.

And did I mention that during this long stretch of time I was working a very demanding full-time job?

Time passed. I wrote, made still more new contacts and sold a few books. I still had a good reputation, though by now I was pretty sure whenever my name was mentioned it was prefaced with ‘poor’…

Several years passed in this pleasant semi-stasis. I sold several books, never enough to justify quitting my job, though, and when my job dissolved I went into a series of other, very unusual jobs, not career stuff but some were fun and they kept the lights on. I kept writing, though, because I am a writer.

Then my mother fell suddenly and disastrously ill and my world changed. Writing had to go totally by the wayside. Suddenly I was not just looking after Mother, I was working two jobs, and occasionally a third one as well, because she had something rather exotic and strange, and nothing but experimental medicines would budge it. Experimental medicines are expensive, and most of them were not covered by her insurance. This went on for almost ten years.

During this time, though, fortune did smile on me, because I met my husband and married. Then mother passed away three weeks after the wedding, and I went totally off the rails. It had been just her and me for twenty years. My poor husband deserved better, but he was and is my rock.
Until some five months after Mother’s death, when he was deployed overseas. (He’s an officer in the Navy, thankfully now retired.) When he asked me what I was going to do while he was gone I murmured something vague about getting a job, but he shook his head. All I had ever talked about doing that I really liked was writing, he said, so perhaps I should go back to writing.

Could I? I didn’t know. I thought about it long and hard. The long empty days wore at me, though, and the siren song of words, of creating worlds and populations out of nothing but caffeine and imaginations worked their magic on me. so I dusted off my laptop and began again.

He was gone a year, and when he returned I had sold two books – both to small publishers, as my cred in New York was totally gone. The editors I had known there had either been promoted to the stratosphere, vanished completely or died. Sigh. It was writing.

This was the beginning of the era of self-publishing, and with no little qualms I began to investigate, eventually ending up with my own publishing imprint, a freelance crew with skills that would rival those of any NYC publishing house. I reprinted my old books as they came back to me, did a book or two a year with a wonderful small press and released at least one new book a year.

At last, I thought, things are finally going my way. It’s been a long time, but I’m finally on the way up!
Humph! This past July my husband and I were at a Grand Ball, the conclusion of a convention which we always attend. I was so proud to be wearing the beautiful gold-embroidered dress we bought earlier in Cairo… and just as the dancing started I passed out cold.

Things went downhill from there. EMTs. Ambulance. Emergency room, then straight into surgery for a massive blood clot blocking my renal artery. Barely in recovery when suddenly a team of doctors ran in and snatched me back into the operating theater. Apparently either the clot had split, or there had been two of them. The doctors said nothing, but I heard my nurses whispering amongst themselves that I had died for well over a minute on the table. The writer in me stewed – one of the seminal events of life itself, an event people have discussed for millenia – and it actually happened to me, but I was under deep anesthesia and don’t remember a thing about it!

After a week in the hospital I came home, and moved into my own bed, where I didn’t move for weeks. Writing? I was doing good to eat. And six months later I’m still not up to speed. My own doctor said I was a bit long in the tooth for such extreme things. I told him it wasn’t my choice, and promised to be better. And I have been, sort of. Yes, we did take a Christmas Market tour of Southern Germany, a costly and long awaited trip and I was most definitely not going to deprive the husband, who had looked forward to it for months.

A fascinating but exhausting trip. I probably shouldn’t have gone, but I did and I survived it, even if I had to be wheelchaired off the plane and to the taxi. One small bright spot is if I do a story about it the entire trip is tax deductible. But I haven’t written a word in over six months. There are half-finished projects languishing on my computer which I cannot remember at all.

And so I am back to starting over. Again. Will I do it? That’s a dumb question. Of course I will, whether I choose to or not.

I am a writer.

Ladies of Mystery

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