I have a confession. Also, I offer apologies.

When I started writing, it was strictly for fun. A handful of short fiction pieces, none of which went anywhere. Later, I wrote a few local newspaper and magazine articles. Nothing fancy. 

I didn't take it seriously because for one thing, I was working full time at an outdoor job. I also thought the physical pain I was in was normal, when indeed it was anything but ordinary. 

All my life, I wanted to become a veterinarian. I'm delighted now that I didn't sign up for college loans. It was not to be: the pain stemmed from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic connective tissue condition. The years of attempting to work in Kentucky's equine industries took a toll. So did learning to walk on partly dislocated ("subluxated") feet. The pain is now worse, any hope of those old dreams long gone, buried deep in worry. 

As the pain slowly increased, the micro injury damages cumulative and progressive, I found myself indoors more and more. Also slowly, I was trapped in my own head.

I began to look for things to distract myself. This was during the years when I tried full time on campus classes. I did complete some correspondence courses, but ran out of both cash and options. Twice, I enrolled... and left. Eventually, I dropped the idea. 

My older sister was a professional artist, and since I'd dabbled in visual arts all my life with everyone else in the family, I taught myself to paint. There was a lot of encouragement from a wide range of people, but also a lot of jealousy and pain on my sister's part. I made an effort not to compete with her; art was her life, depression her lifelong companion. 

Nothing much I did sold—not surprising, considering I wasn't quite either professional or folk artist (ie: self taught). To keep me going, my husband swapped for an old Pentax K-1000 camera, a 35mm fully manual model. I loved it, so eventually more cameras found their way home with us. New and better, still prior to the digital wonders we see these days. I never got that far. Why? Nothing sold. Others had the skills, but I had fun going out with my husband, searching for gorgeous landscape or wildlife shots. We gifted newlyweds with bonus candid photos as wedding gifts, just handing over the film canisters in the reception line. But... nothing much sold. 

We lost our home to a tornado. Things took a twist.

I dabbled in the writing more and more as pain and misunderstood inflammation wracked my body. I stayed home, my husband working brutally hard jobs to compensate for the loss of my contributions. 

I acquired first one old refurbished computer, then a new custom model, and the advent of dial-up internet took me out of small town life, into the great world beyond. With a lifelong love of reading to bolster me, I began to haunt Yahoo Books amd Literature chatrooms at all hours. I wasn't sleeping and had no job to do on a regular basis. At the encouragement of a chat pal, I started a blog. 

I did a few days of labor here and there helping a local veterinarian with a wide range of odd jobs. A blacksmith friend had me go hold horses for him; we had worked together grooming in the bluegrass years. Anything to stay out of my own head. 

I was asked to contribute a few newspaper and magazine articles. They were gratis, mostly. The first blog ran a year, a Yahoo 360. During that year, it had over 46,000 hits. I ended up having to make it private, available by invitation only, because the traffic locked it up daily. 

I ran across some old printouts from it a few days ago. They were terrible. And that's an understatement. The contents were fine, but I badly needed either education or both a line and a content editor. Phew, what a mess.

Yahoo shut down 360. My archives are somewhere on floppy disks—yes, that long ago!—but may not be in good shape after multiple decades in various storage units. I kept trying to work at something. Anything. 

A family friend starting up a publishing business invited me to publish some of my stories with her. After discussion, we worked up a plan. Unfortunately, my parents were aging and ill, my pain levels progressively worse, and the small press owner's spouse was terribly ill. We were all exhausted, the whole thing built to collapse. And it finally did. By mutual agreement, we ended up taking the book out of print. There was no real blame to be placed on either side that couldn't be matched. It's not like—you might guess this part—the books were selling much.

Nor was the first book out there for long. Because... well, there's that thing about sales.

A nice lady I'd never met tried hard to help us, pushing me to publish a series of five smallish volumes of narrative nonfiction quasi-memoir, all of them animal related, including some essays created during the years we so happily lived off-grid. She volunteered to do the editing and set them up, cover and all. She also bought most of the ones sold. 

I kept trying to write fiction, but it wasn't working for me. She kept encouraging me, but... it was like a wall sprang up. Nonfiction, sure. Fiction? NOPE.

To my great surprise, the nonfiction collection was accepted to go "on the floor" at the Kentucky Book Fair. I'm a hermit by nature! I panicked! Introvert spasms erupted!

To get out of my own head, I made up the silliest premise I could, and sat down to wait the last three weeks prior to the Book Fair. I wasn't able to do much more. In a recliner, loaded with chronic pain and by that time unable to take any kind of pain medication at all, I took up my beloved little Toshiba Satellite laptop and wrote, finally, a novel manuscript. In three weeks. Magical realism. 

The nice lady met us in Frankfort, where the Book Fair was held, and I handed her a freshly burned disk with a rough draft of the story. She was stunned. I hadn't told her I was writing it, and she knew of my issues with creating fiction. But she took it, loved it and edited it, and made the book happen. 

I think she was trying to get out of her head, too. Newly widowed, alone but for one adult child, saddled with budget woes and familial drama, she still did her best to help. 

A month after the Book Fair, I sent her a second one, a sequel. I dawdled over the third one for quite some time. A couple months? Something like that. And three novels suddenly existed. 

Ebooks pained me. They didn't sell much—no surprise to me—and all around me, digital piracy was making inroads on other authors' hard work. I pulled them. I stuck to paperbacks. They're still out there, but (I know this is repetitive, but I have a purpose you'll soon understand) they don't sell much. Honestly, I don't push them. 

I long ago gave up "professional author" in the queue after "photographer" and "painter". I still do all these things and more, but on a much reduced basis, as occasional hobbies. Unbeknownst to me, I was, troubled by practical need, doing a fine job of self-sabotaging all of it. I never understood the industry, and to be honest, I probably still don't, though I'm trying.

Again, we lost a home. I won't go into particulars here, but it involved a number of greedy guts locals. It was a time of horrors that has persisted to this day. 

A surprising community came to our aid in many ways. We are always grateful for that, willing to support them as best we can in return.

In an attempt to find some peace of mind, I joined a group on long-lost Twitter, looking for community I didn't and don't have locally. They're great folks—led by indie author Jeff Demarco, the #WolfPackAuthors made two huge anthologies, donating the initial profits to charity early on, then dropping the paperback versions to go all ebook on a broad platform basis. The ebooks are still available. I have a story included in each "sampler". 

The Pack and others have encouraged me since the local publisher and the nice lady from a different state. I've been grateful to them all, but still had that Imposter Syndrome voice in my head yammering about low sales numbers. 

With an illness constantly changing and age compounding it, keeping necessities for living going while my husband and I both drowning in early Social Security limitations, we ended up losing everything. Home, my parents, his mother, everything in between that we worked hard for too many years. Lean years. Bad years.

During those years, I read, wrote, studied, worked through a bad manuscript (still learning fiction) and then a good one. The good one took forty-three editing passes while I figured out how to shape it. When it was finished, I skipped the old heartache of the publishing industry, the cutthroat joys of the arts industries in general, and gave it a heave toward a large contest. I've been waiting since May of this year for the day of reckoning, only to see it pushed back five more days... 

I'd say I could kick myself, but I won't. Someone else—several folks, in fact—laid into my hide on three separate occasions. They were right. I've changed. I'd kick me, too, if it wouldn't make the pain crud worse.

All that work plus a long list of free online webinars, workshops, and symposiums made a difference. And I learned something. Several somethings.

Sales numbers that early in the making of a writer don't mean jack, baby. What matters is writing a damned good story. Age is merely a complication, and skill has nothing to do with even multiple or compounded disabilities. 

My family and certain teachers did a number on me. They were loud and certain, up in my face. I was stupid, lazy, incapable, worthless in their eyes. Eventually, in mine, too.

All those encouragers weren't just being nice, as I thought. They were right. I don't think I'll start an ego dance, crowing about my elite expertise any time soon. Nonetheless, I am a writer and visual artist.

It's time and past time for me to move on. Professionalism first requires recognition and a progressive rise in skills. Age, money, dead dreams? They're in the past to stay. 

Wish me luck. If I don't win that contest, maybe I'll win another. So I write reclined. That's nothing. Others do, too.

I'm not alone. I never was. This path I can travel in the darkest times. This path leads... somewhere real.