COMMUNITY. SHARING LIFE.

As we honor and memorialize the 9-11 anniversary of the Twin Towers terrorist attacks, I’m reminded, again, how we are all connected. Forever.

We watched the towers fall from our television set in California, while on the phone with our son, who was attending NYU. He watched from the dorms some 26 blocks away.

I didn’t know until later that I lost a member of my graduating class at Gunn in Palo Alto. Or that later I’d lose another member of my class in an attack on the UN offices in Algeria. I will never forget, as I’m sure most of you will never forget, where you were when you heard the news. We go forward with heavy hearts, but it never gets old to remember those who sacrificed so much. If we are truly to live, we need to do this as a world. It goes far beyond country, religion or cultural ethnicity. It is a scar on the landscape of the whole world, healed by love and remembrance.

Yesterday I spoke to the San Francisco chapter of Romance Writers of America. My topic was on becoming an Elite Warrior Indie Author. I’ve had the good fortune to meet, interview and be mentored by some of the greatest minds of today. Hopefully, I brought some of that to focus for the group.

A highlight of the day was that a group of readers came all the way from Sacramento to visit!  It became clear to me, as I was preparing my talk, that our stories, once they leave us, no longer belong to us, but belong to the readers. How perfect that they were there.

We all want the easy walk, the life without conflict, tooling down the road of success and happiness like the resolutions in our romance novels. But reality isn’t like that at all. The beauty of the fabric of life is that we are all connected. We share our lives with each other. We share our stories. We share our tears, and we share how we all move on.

Thank you for being part of my journey.