Please welcome Jeri Westerson to Suspense Your Disbelief. Jeri delivers a Moment that touches on two elements particularly meaningful to me–the place of libraries in childhood, and what happens when the secret, stolen pleasure of writing stories finally becomes public. Read on…

Truth be told, I don’t think I’ve quite made it yet. “Making it” in publishing means to me that you keep on publishing, that you don’t have to worry whether the publisher will offer you the next contract or not, and I’m not quite there yet.

On the other hand, for fourteen years I wrote novel after novel and got rejections by the binder-full and I finally have three books on bookstore shelves. On most days, that feels like I’ve “made it.”

I thought it would be the big things, strangers recognizing me or my name (they don’t) or mobbed at bookstore signings (I’m not), or special treatment with publisher paid book tours (nope). It turns out it’s the little things. Getting giddy to find my books in a bookstore. And, oddly, finding it in a library seems to hold so much more weight to me than in a bookstore. In a library, it’s got those special tags and barcodes and that little extra tag that declares it a “Mystery.” It seems more official in a library, that it’s important enough to be in that hallowed building where I spent so much of my childhood.

Then it’s also the little thing of receiving email fan letters. These are from people I will never meet in places—sometimes other countries—I will never go to. Strangers are reading and loving my books. My books, that, since childhood, I wrote alone and mostly in secret, never letting another living soul read them let alone know about them. But now the world may read them if they wish (go ahead, World. Read them!).

I’m grateful for those little things. They help me write the next one.

Jeri Westerson is on the board of directors for the southern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and also editor if its newsletter. She’s president of the Orange County chapter of Sisters in Crime and a member of Sisters in Crime Los Angeles. She is also a member of Private Eye Writers of America. She is married to a commercial photographer, has a son in college, and herds two cats, a tortoise, and the occasional tarantula at her home in southern California.