I got my first review yesterday.  The reader didn’t like the first two books.  Criticism is always helpful.  If it’s true, even in part, I can learn from it.  If it isn’t, it toughens me.  Life is hard, & as much as I would like it to be all puppies & kittens, it just isn’t.  Life has its wonders: hummingbirds & horses running & the sound of the stream down the hill from my house & the smell of the pines & good friends.  But it also has terrible things in it & I grew up with a lot of terrible things in my life.  My mother was a schizophrenic.  In the 1950s, there were no antipsychotics.  My arms were broken 4 times, twice on each arm, because she got mad at me.  I was burned a couple of times.

And each time, she told me it was my fault until I came to believe it.

So I know that I need criticism, even if it’s wrong, because until the day I die, there will always be a part of me that believes it was my fault.  So I need to keep practicing believing in myself.

And my work.

And I do.

There were no antipsychotics, but there were wonderful television shows that gave me hope.  A few years ago, Retro TV ran one of my favorites.  It was written by blacklisted writers, something I didn’t know 50 years ago.  The writing was so powerful that I remembered some of the dialogue, word for word, 50 years later.  That’s pretty impressive considering the fact that some days, I have trouble remembering where my keys were.

Anyway, last night, I had to remind myself that I didn’t write the Flynn Family Saga so that I could get pats on the back or make money.  I wrote it to pass along what those writers in the 1950s gave me.

Hope.