The Birth of My Book

THE BIRTH OF MY BOOK

This past Mother’s day, I reflected on how I never knew I’d be blessed with a child. In my past life, my identity seemed wrapped around fancy corporate titles—including VP of Marketing, Senior Competitive Marketing Analyst and Product Marketing Manager. I loved these titles! They gave me power. Respect. A highly regarded standing in a world dominated by men. I even had a Rosie the Riveter poster on my office wall with the “We can do it” tagline. In my mind, it merely represented being a woman working my way up the testosterone-laden corporate ladder.

Back then, I never dreamed of writing a novel. It simply was never a goal. Apart from over two decades of writing marketing content for the high-powered, high-tech world I lived in, one title I never considered myself was “writer.”

Later, at forty-three years of age hearing a small, sweet voice use my new identity, “Mommy,”—something pulled at my emotional heartstrings. I tried to combine my titles of VP of Marketing with President of Motherhood. To live a double life. I couldn’t do it. Sorry Rose, I’m not your superwoman.

I am a mother. A mother with a voice. A voice that needed to shout its way out onto paper. To shout its way out to the world.  Listen to me, please! 

I wrote a novel, not because of any desire to become an author but because I had a story to share. After twenty years working in the computer networking industry, I took advantage of the digital revolution I helped create and self-published my debut novel, MASKS OF MORALITY.  A novel I plugged away at for over eight years while watching my precious child grow. While watching the world he will grow up in, spiral out of control. My “book baby” was long overdue.

I’ve come to view publishing a novel and birthing a child as having similar processes. Both are an arduous, emotional journey in which months or even years of labor and devotion culminate into the creation of something totally unique. Just like when I was an expectant mother, becoming an author was an exercise of grueling patience, enduring stress combined with joy. In both instances, I felt something I created develop inside of me.   Every book is an author’s baby. Like the genetic code of a child, no other person could create the books each author writes. The words are our world, only we can bring our books to life.

I am a writer after all—a writer at heart who fantasizes about a better world for our children. I am a ferocious reader drawn to books like ants to a picnic. I wake up in the middle of the night and have to write words down. I find myself scribbling ideas on my memo app, on napkins at restaurants, a piece of paper from my purse anywhere and everywhere I go. I have notebooks piled on my home-office floor filled with notes cover to cover. I love to write. So that makes me a writer, right?

I wrote my book from the heart and soul. It was a creation that unfolded like music, thundering into the world while taking care of my child and community around him. The emotions molding my words on paper were like feeling my baby’s movement inside my womb. I gave birth to MASKS OF MORALITY, and am “expecting” my second book baby, MONSTER BEHIND THE MASKS, to be delivered late 2018. I am pushing through this demanding process without any iconic Rose the Riveter image to spur me on. As it turns out, this wartime propaganda poster used to push unscrupulous political agenda is, in part, what I write about.

I am superwoman after all. As I gave birth to literature with a moral purpose.