Hope for the Wicked

​In less than one week, six days in fact, my second book, "River of Light,"will be released. For a writer, this can be a time of great doubt—will the book sell? Will it be well-received? Will I make enough money from this book to publish another? Is this the book I want to be known for?

The odds, in this world of readers whose reading is limited to twitter, texting, and Snapchat and who prefer to get their stories in video form, are not great.  But lately, I ‘ve been exposed to many news channels courtesy of my husband who turns them on to watch the latest political fallout and then goes outside to work in the garden.

In my office, I can hear those voices rehashing the day’s bits and pieces. They make carefully hedged predictions, play snippets of candidate speeches, explain the judicial proceedings. It’s dreadful, but when I hear a voter speak of Donald Trump as God-given, Trump telling his Christian followers that anyone who votes for the democrats is crazy (Does that mean that he doesn’t think Democrats are Christians?), when he hawks ugly golden “Never Surrender” sneakers to help pay his legal bills and he has a go fund me account to get money for his bills while bragging that he has plenty of cash on hand—it makes me wonder.

If people can believe this man whole-heartedly, if church-going Christians can support and send their money to a proven liar, adulterer, and con artist, it gives me hope that there are also people out there who would buy books and read them. It could happen.

As more and more states ban books, teachers curtail their curriculum in order to keep their jobs and women face the limitation of their reproductive choices, I am grateful that I am too old to become pregnant, I’ve already read most of the banned books, and that I got to teach a curriculum based on fact and truth instead of edited fiction. And, I admit to taking some comfort in being a rogue, a renegade, a wicked scoundrel for being a writer--A writer of fiction, a writer of things that teeter on the edge of reality, a writer of books that include four curse woods. Having been a goody two-shoes most of my life, being a rogue is exhilarating to me. Maybe, if I’m lucky, my books will be banned. (at least that would mean that somebody read them!)