2008

So I had this grand idea. After numerous broken relationships, smashed hearts, and really shitty dates I’d decided that being alone for the rest of my life would be better than all of the bullshit associated with dating and being in a relationship. There was only one man who I ever truly loved, trusted, and admired in my life and when he was taken away from me I knew I was destined to be single forever.  I figured that a big cuddly dog, a smutty romance novel, and a good vibrator could keep me just as happy, if not happier than I’d ever been in any of the relationships that I’d considered "good." You might laugh, but think about it… The dog would be there for me to cuddle with and talk to when I needed to vent. He would give me his undying attention, and never talk back or cut me off in the middle of a story saying, "Baby, let’s just fuck." The smutty romance novel would let me live vicariously through the eyes of some fantastic globetrotting heroine without actually having to make more effort than curling up in bed and reaching out for a page turn every few minutes. And let’s face it… a good vibe would get me off, every time, and never give me a STD or knock me up.  As long as I fed the dog, joined a book club and supplied a fresh set of batteries every so often I’d be set.

It was a good idea if I say so myself. I had a Prime membership on Amazon.com for all of my book purchases, a drawer that was always stocked with batteries for my favorite sex toys, and I became the proud mama to a furkid named Vinnie. Vinnie was a big lazy floppy thing of a dog who was the biggest baby in the word, but he was all mine. When I’d adopted him as a puppy from the Humane Society he had as many trust issues as I did. He’d been abused and abandoned before ending up at the Humane Society, and the minute I saw him I knew he had to be mine because we were too much alike. Of course I hadn’t planned on him growing up to weigh nearly as much as I did, snore worse than an old man, or hog the bed at night, but I loved him nevertheless. Over time he learned to trust me and doing so gave me faith that maybe someday I’d be able to trust again too (if I felt like it, that is).

By the time Vinnie was two I was pretty content with my new destiny. I’d learned how to be happy alone and my waking hours weren’t spent dating a bunch of losers wondering if I would find Mr. Right.  Vinnie was my furry social barometer.  If he didn’t trust someone then I knew not to trust them either.  The one time that I didn’t heed Vinnie’s warning and let someone into my condo who Vinnie didn’t like, the guy ended up trying to steal my laptop when he was supposed to be fixing my air conditioning.  Thankfully though, I caught the guy in the process and then Vinnie scared the piss out of him barking and growling while I called the building security and threatened to knock the guy upside the head with my Louisville Slugger.

I know what you’re thinking.  Surely I must be some homely loser hermit with a bunch of social phobias.  Otherwise why would I want to be alone and live with my dog, right?   You think I’m just a few trips to the Humane Society from becoming a Cat Lady and I don’t know the difference between eye liner and lip liner.  I’m not a loser though, I’m not a hermit, and sometimes I’d damn hot.  I love to travel, I rarely leave the house without makeup on, and I work from home because I can (in addition to having an extreme and very rare allergy to working in a cubicle).  I fully admit that there is an overwhelming sense of freedom in being able to sit around in mix-matched pajamas with bad hair any time I want.  Seriously, why the hell would I want to bring a man into my house and have to feel like I could only wear matching pajamas and make sure that my legs were always shaved?  Being alone with my books, my vibes, and my dog gave me the freedom I need to do my job instead of wasting time with bullshit that never really ends up mattering.

I’m a writer.  A novelist to be exact, and if I can toot my own horn for a moment I’m typically one of the most creative people you can find in a room full of average people (how many hermits do you know who can say that, huh?).  I spend my days and nights arranging words into works of art that people then buy (or check out from the library) to enjoy.  Writing is my life and my true love.

The books that put me on the public radar were a group of Teen/Young Adult books in a series based in a fictional town called Lake Pleasanton.  The Lake Pleasanton series is sort of like those Traveling Pants books but without the magical jeans.  I wrote about things that most, if not all, girls and women go through, added in a little romance here and there, and I had a hit.  By the time I had been out of college for a year I’d published book one of Lake Pleasanton and had nearly finished the second book.  Over time I added characters and broadened the lives of my characters to places outside of their little Midwestern hometown, but the real-life situations I wrote of never faltered.  I refused to write pithy crap just so that I could crank out my books at a rapid pace.  Lake Pleasanton got me noticed in the writing world, but it wasn’t by far my biggest hit.

My brother was the previously mentioned only man I ever truly loved, trusted, and admired in my life.  He was killed on 9/11.  His office had been on a floor above where the plane hit and he was unable to get out due to all of the escape routes being destroyed by the inferno caused by the jet fuel.  When he died, it was like having a limb torn from my body over and over again.  It was like being hit in the face with a brick and then having someone poke at my bruises with a knife.  In other words it was hell.  His death seriously fucked me up, but it also inspired a book.  My novel Tuesday Morning was the book that put me on the best sellers list and changed my whole world. 

It didn’t matter to me that I was suddenly a writer who was well known and I was doing talk shows and book tours.  I still believed that it was my destiny to be alone and although I generally enjoyed the fame that writing brought me, I still didn’t want anything to do with trying to add a romance into my life.  My friends, family, and even my agent were constantly trying to set me up on blind dates or telling me how they had a great guy friend that I needed to meet.  I suppose it was flattering to know that they thought enough of me to want to set me up, but I stayed away from the dating scene like the plague.

My mom would tell me, "Love will find you when you least expect it, honey…"

I’d laugh and tell her, "Well it’s going to have to work hard to find me, because I’m in hiding…"

Have I mentioned that my mom is prophetic?   Yeah, pretty much all of the women in our family have a touch of psychic power and my mom is downright freaky sometimes.  She can say something to me out of the blue and then a few minutes, hours, or days later, it will happen just like that. Like one day over lunch when she looked up at me from her pasta and said, "He has green eyes… Stunning green eyes."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I asked and laughed.

"He has green eyes…" she repeated calmly and kept eating her lunch.

"I HEARD that Mama, but WHO has green eyes?"

She shook her head and shrugged, "I don’t know… but he does…"

Most people would have thought she’d lost her mind and taken a moment to call the nearest mental hospital to have her checked out... But I shrugged it off, and two days later those stunning green eyes came smack dab into my life.