When I Wake in the Morning

Hello Love,

There’s a line from the movie Sister Act II that has stuck with me since I heard it:

“If you wake up in the morning, and you can’t think of anything but singing. Then you should be a singer.”

Well, I can’t sing. Not even a little. Not even if my life depended on it. But writing and storytelling is my singing. Since I was a little girl, I’ve been telling stories. Before I could read or write I was making up stories, especially with my Barbies. When I was in middle school I wrote (by hand), every night after I finished my homework, I wrote a soap opera starring my friends and classmates. I’ve always written because I’ve always had a story. I have stacks and stacks of paper, binders, and countless computer files with things I’ve written from poems to short stories to beginnings of novels. Then life got in the way.

I was a mother and wife with a full-time job. So even though I woke up thinking about writing, I wasn’t putting pen to paper as frequently and eventually not at all. Eventually, I stopped thinking about writing when I woke up.

Then one day my life started to change. I was divorced and I was getting passed over for promotions at work. I was suddenly a single mother struggling to make my paycheck last until the next one. I could get angry and mad because of my circumstances. I could sit around and feel sorry for myself and ask God why me? Why does my life so hard? Why is my life not fair? But I didn’t. I asked what instead. What am I supposed to learn from my struggles? What path am I being moved towards?

The answer came on Facebook. My cousin had posted that she was going to participate in the National Novel Writing Month ( NaNoWriMo for short) and asked who wanted to do it with her. The NaNoWriMo challenge is to write 50 thousand words in 30 days. That sounded crazy, but I was crazy enough to sign up.

At the end of that month, I had a rough draft of a novel. In all the writing I’d ever done, I’d never finished a novel. That was the first time I made it from once upon a time to they lived happily ever after. I was satisfied with that accomplishment. Having completed a novel (even just a rough draft) put me in an elite group of people.

While I was satisfied with that, my cousin and sister (both who’d read my rough), were not. They insisted I polish up the rough and publish a novel. I did some research and found technology made it so anyone could publish for little to no money so I went for it. I published my first e-book Jack and Diane. My expectation was my friends and family would buy it just to be nice and it wouldn’t sell much more.

I was very wrong. Within a week I reached number 1 on Amazon Kindle’s African-American literature (as well as African-American Romance and Interracial Romance). I’d sold a couple of thousand in the first week. I got several 4 and 5-star reviews. I’ve since published two more books. One of which also reached number one. Combined with over 25 thousand copies of my three books have been sold. I’ve even had a major publisher reach out to me and I’m in the process of completing a novel for submission. Writing has proved so much more rewarding than feeling sorry for myself.

Follow your passion. When faced with adversity, grow from it. Take advantage of modern technology to not just entertain you, but improve you.

Love,

Lena