It’s confession time.

On a few fronts.

First off.

The other day?

I’m loathe to admit it, but the green-eyed monster of envy raked her insidious claws through my psyche and made me bleed.

It wasn’t pretty by any means.

I brought it on myself and I should have known better, but still, it happened and I’m not going to pretend it never happened.

You see, my mother-in-law sent me a STARS calendar because she’d made a generous donation and they’d given her extra…

…you’re rolling your eyes right now, aren’t you?… Thinking, ‘Oh, boy, here she goes again on some wacked out dot-to-dot tangent that may or may not demonstrate a correlation to her title up top’…

Well. You’re right. This is going to be one of those dot to dot kinds of stories, because sometimes things just aren’t as linear as we’d like them to be. Now. Back to my point and I do have one–honest.

So, I’ve got the STARS (Shock Trauma Air Rescue Society) calendar hanging on my office wall and of course, I read January’s story about the poor little girl who’d impaled her palette and then her brain with a chopstick (she’s okay, don’t worry!) and because this particular incident happened near my hometown, I’m looking at the picture of the little girl and her mom and I’m thinking, “Do I know this lady?”

I don’t recognize the mom, but then I read the story again and take better note of the little girl’s last name. It doesn’t take much for me to determine that quite likely, given this little girl’s age and her last name, that I know and went to highschool with her dad (believe me, the towns where I grew up are small–we’re talking two hundred and fifty if you count the cats).

So now I’m thinking about this little girl’s dad, who I didn’t know that well, but he happened to be friends with one of my friends.

Now I lost track of this particular friend years ago. So what does one do in this day and age to find someone?

They GOOGLE!

So I GOOGLED my friend and guess what?

Turns out he’s a columnist for a prominent national newspaper and after the two seconds it takes me to be glad and think, “Cool! Good for him,” something entirely different rolls in and takes over.

Something along the lines of “What makes you think you’ve got what it takes to be published?”

KAPOW!

Totally blindsided and there I was…down on myself, green-eyed and snarky.

It was quite the experience as I’m not usually prone to that kind of stuff and I’d like to say I talked myself out of it, but I didn’t. In fact, I stewed and brewed and got worse (and that is not an writer’s euphemism for ate myself sick and drank myself silly, either!)

Luckily, there’s such a thing as mail in this country and it just happened that I was in town to get ours and in it was the SASP that I’d included with my thank you letter to Jessica Alvarez (who you remember had RISING SIN) offering her a chance to look at TRAIL OF REDEMPTION.

And on that SASP was her request for TRAIL.

Not the partial, but the full and I didn’t even send a synopsis! Bless her dear assistant editorial soul, she’s willing to read it because she’s liked my previous work.

Good-bye green eyes, welcome back blue!

So there you have it. My first installment of confessions. Stay tuned for more dirt.