This is a big day for me. Actually, this is a big moment. I’ve waited to do this in the way you might wait to buy a pair of jeans – or a slinky top – or even a flowered bikini – until you’ve lost those nagging five or ten or however many pounds. Except, since I am the type who refuses to diet and knows I’ll never look like those gals who wear bikinis anyway, that wasn’t what I was waiting for. I already bought the jeans and the slinky top, five pounds be damned. No, what I was waiting for was to start this blog.

A really, scarily long number of years ago, I began to write seriously and signed with my first agent. (OK, it was…No, I can’t say how many. Not yet. Maybe once I get used to this.) At that point it wasn’t essential to have a website and I wasn’t reading any blogs. But not longer after, when I began to get the sense that writing a novel, finding an agent who liked that novel, and selling the aforementioned novel might all be separate things, I made a vow. I vowed not to have a website built until I was published.

You’re thinking I just sold my “first” novel, right? Alas, no, not yet. My latest, a psychological mystery, is actually out on sub right now as we speak. I am with a new agent – not that my first wasn’t wonderful – and oh, how I adore this woman. She is smart, passionate, and inspired. So perhaps one day I’ll be writing in these pages news of a sale.

But something did happen for me that is enough of a milestone that I decided, what the hey, time to jump on the ole bandwagon. I mean, it’s not like I’m an early adopter. Not having a blog today is kind of like when your grandmother says, And you can really make a call on one of those tiny things?

So the other day a writer named Libby Malin – whose teen mystery I just ordered and am chomping at the bit to read – sent a post around saying she was starting a blog that would feature short stories. Not short stories of the sort that you may be used to (or not used to). Those are the kind of short stories that stopped me from ever submitting the ones I wrote. I like to tell stories with a beginning, a middle, and a – usually in some way justified – end. And somehow those seem to have trouble appearing in the short story publications.

Don’t get me wrong. I greatly admire the writers of those kinds of stories. They are inevitably deep, exquisite, and meaningful pieces of life or truth or consequences. I just can’t write them.

Anyway, Libby wanted to do something different. Something more in line with kind of writer I hope to be. She wanted to publish shorts that drew in the sort of readers who sit down with a book, get drawn away, and look up sometime after dinner was supposed to have been started, eaten, and cleaned up. Since that’s the kind of story I aim to write, I sent her one of mine. And Libby graciously decided to publish it.

She may not know it, but after – no, still can’t bring myself to say – however many years writing and crafting and trying to learn this crazy biz, Libby has given me my first legitimate publication cred.

Thanks, Libby.

And thank you, for reading. Please come back soon!