I once had a best friend who I loved more than anything. I still love her. I still miss her. She's not dead, by the way, just gone from my life.
Life moves forward and things I don't think she fully understood (or chose to ignore) happened and she is no longer in my life. I mistakenly thought she was my ride or die, I know I was hers. I would have given her a kidney. And this wasn't a flash-in-the-pan friendship, we are talking over a decade of friendship. She was there for me when Andi died and was one of the only ones who kept my head above water. I had never met anyone who "got me," as she did and I mourn the loss of our friendship. Losing her broke my heart and when it all went down there was no opportunity to explain, it was just over with what she "assumed," happened. And let me tell you her assumption was wrong. Very wrong.
Anyhow, that was a long time ago but there is one issue I can't get past. We were writing partners. We wrote a women's Southern fiction book called Campfire Secrets, we had an agent (who we ultimately had to fire because she was a fraud) and we were on the cusp of acquiring our dream agent. I'm not bragging, but the book was/is excellent. Our dream was to be a writing team and we had so many ideas for future books and had already begun writing our second novel when our friendship tanked.
Campfire Secrets has been sitting in my Dropbox for years and I pulled it out the other day and read it. It made me realize that life is too short not to go for your dreams. So, I emailed my former best friend/writing partner and told her I wanted to self-publish it. She agreed. So, I'm going to do it. I mean, John Grisham self-published A Time to Kill, and today in the world of social media such as #BookTok I believe it still has great potential. I have hired my sister, Kristy to do the cover and all the magic to get it ready for the bookshelf, and it should be up and available sometime in mid-February.
I am also working on a book called The Cave that I started way back during my undergrad in a creative writing class I was taking. I have done an extreme amount of research about caves for this novel which takes place during the early 80's and is about a man who loses his daughter to abduction (they say write what you know) and murder. This is from a man's point of view because I have noticed the extreme difference between how a man reacts to violent crime versus how a woman reacts. I have about 100 pages written on this and it's getting very deep and dark.
That's it for today. In the next blog post, I will put the back book cover description of Campfire Secrets so you can get an idea of what it is all about.
In the meantime...godspeed, friend.