In my early twenties, I had the fortunate experience of getting my first rejection slip. I don't remember the actual bit of writing that garnered that impersonal note. It doesn't matter. The important thing was that I didn't have a huge personal investment in the project. If I felt dismay over the rejection, the pride of being a writer on the path to publication overshadowed it. Hey, I had a rejection slip. Writers get rejection slips. Ta Da.

I learned that not every rejection slip is easy to read. But many of them can be. The secret is to diminish the amount of importance on any particular one. As soon as the Send button is pushed on the email with the precious attachment, it's time to click on the new projects folder and get to work.

A writer deeply involved in writing a story has a new baby in the house. It's harder to be crushed when the older toddler scrapes his knee. It happens. And, there's a bit of pain but the new baby takes the attention.

With self-publishing, may people will never get to read these words: While this project has merit, we do not believe it is right for us at this time. 

People will self-publish, and their sales will be their gauge of whether the project has merit. But a lot of wonderful reads get buried in the mountain of books, and it's possibly not any easier for a story to get noticed now than when rejections were easy to gather.

Perhaps cliché's are too true. No matter how much things change, they really don't change very much. Rejection slips will always be with us in one form or another. It's best to see them as little bits of paper that can be wadded and burned, or as steps to your next goal.

 On my forty-fourth birthday, my husband took me to a music store. I realized as I was waiting for him to pick out a guitar-for himself--that if I expected a present, I'd better select something because it was getting late and later we were going straight home. I got a mandolin, probably because it was more reasonably priced than most of the other instruments. I thought it would look good hanging on the wall as a decorative item.

I kept it handy for a year, and something kept nudging me to take lessons and learn how to play the mandolin. (It had taken my husband several hours and he'd learned to strum a few tunes on it.)

The week I turned forty five, I'd given up hope on finding a mandolin teacher, and decided I'd have to improvise if I wanted to learn how to play the thing. I went to the music store offering guitar lessons, and stood back and looked at the guys talking with the young man behind the counter. The employees, while they might be talented, couldn't have the experience to teach me to play guitar.

I only knew of one other music teacher in town, so I called him. He taught the violin, but I had one of those too. I'd secretly hoped my husband would play it. Now I decided if I took lessons and worked hard, in a month or so, I'd convince the teacher to switch to mandolin. He could teach violin, guitar and piano. Surely he could teach mandolin.

I took my first music lesson on a Friday the 13th. You could look at it two ways. For instance, my learning the violin was doomed. It was. But the lessons changed my life. I became fascinated with the music. The violin, supposedly the instrument most like the human voice, brought out my emotions. I wrote a biography, of a sort, about my experiences and how they colored my life. And I just kept writing. 

Then, I wrote a novel.

This wasn't the first time I'd written a manuscript, or even the second, but something was different. I was enjoying it.

My mandolin is on the wall, and I still think it's a nice decorative object.That violin manuscript resides under my bed. And on a Friday the 13th, 2013, I got a contract for publication of a romance novel. Something I'd dreamed of years before my musical exploration. I wonder, if I hadn't been sitting in a store, bored, on my birthday, would I have started on the path to making a dream come true?

I think something inside me wanted to change my life. And I was ready to pick a mandolin off the wall at a music store. I didn't know what I wanted, but I was willing to start searching, even if it was the equivalent of turning over the first rock I came across and looking under it. I found my dream, it just wasn't the way I expected. Crooked journeys can still get you to your destination.

One Saturday, at a nearby museum, I saw four wooden stakes on the wall. It surprised me because I don't remember ever hearing of any vampires in Enid, OK. So, I didn't know of any reason for the weapons to be needed.
The first thing I thought was that Alicia Dean would like to see these. Alicia is a huge fan of the Vampire Diaries television show. She also writes for the Vampire Diaries book series and does an incredible job capturing the characters' personalities in her novels.

Alicia is a friendly and caring person, however when she was a child, her imaginary friend did not survive. I don't think anyone ever discovered what caused the imaginary friend's demise. But little Alicia did tell her mother where the body was buried. I don't think there was a funeral or a wake. (For more about Alicia, check out her website http://aliciadean.com/  )

I learned recently that wakes were originally held after a person's death to make sure they were really dead before they were interred. It wasn't a good idea to wake up after burial, even if you were able to get to fresh air.

Imagine, being in the Middle Ages. The body has been buried, awakened from a coma, and managed to get to the top side of the grave. Now the villagers look up and a dirty, ill, recently buried person is walking toward them. Zombie anyone?

It's said the second time the person was buried, they stayed buried.

My cat is even more fascinated with quill pens than I am.