Lesson #2: There is NO Golden Key!

Only YOU can unlock the door to success.

My whole life – as I was dreaming of writing a book – I would walk into a bookstore and stare at the shelves. I would run my fingers over the shiny, embossed names of authors on the front covers and think, “I will never be a part of this group.”

I honestly believed when I was in college in the 1980s that there was a golden key that was passed around New York City, and only a select few authors were invited to be receive it (Tom Wolfe, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Nora Ephron). Once they did, every door at every publishing house in Manhattan opened as easily and magically as one on a Barbie Dream House.

But let me tell you this: There is no golden key.

Only YOU can unlock the door and make it happen.

How?

Hard work.

Unlearning fear (which I discussed in Lesson #1).

Never giving up.

My Grampa Shipman was an ore miner in our tiny Southwest Missouri Ozarks town of a couple hundred folks (my grandma was a seamstress who stitched overalls at a local factory). They were working poor. When the ore mines dried up, my grampa raked rocks off of farmers’ fields – just to make enough money to feed and clothe his family – so they could plant their crops in the rocky, red clay.

As I grew older, I asked my grandfather — his body broken — how he managed to perform such hard, manual labor, after a lifetime of mining. “How did you rake rocks all day long?”

He looked at me, took a slug of whiskey – his favorite after dinner drink – and said, “I just kept my head down.”

That’s really the essence of success in life. That is also the foundation for success in writing.

Visit my website for more about my grandparents & books!

Just keep your head down. Write. Until the sun dims, or rises.

In my previous life, I was a PR director for educational institutions. I oversaw a large number of board and committee meetings, most of which took place – since the members also had jobs – very early in the morning or in the evening after my job (and theirs) were over for the day. After my mother’s advice to (finally!) write a book so I would not end my life regretting I’d never done it, I was confronted with reality: When did I do it? I had, like so many of you, no time. My life was more than Dolly Parton’s 9-5, it was more like 7-9. Moreover, I was in a relationship for the first time in my life, and I tried to keep my free time free.

One pre-dawn day around four a.m., I woke up to find my 85-pound rescue mutt, Marge (who, btw, the shelter told us was only going to be about 45 pounds), staring at me. For a big dog, she had a small bladder. She always had to go out in the middle of the night, and it was always me who did it (Marge never woke my husband, Gary, both pictured below with Mabel, when we all were MUCH younger!). Years later, I realized both of them had played me. I took her out, came back in, and was about to snuggle back into bed for some much-needed dreamy time when I saw a framed photo of my grandparents. I looked into their eyes. I could hear my grampa say, “Just keep your head down.”