What Now? by Liz Flaherty

I feel fragile. 

There, how was that for a way to get started? I've finished my story for the Lights, Camera, Christmas Town! addition to the Christmas town collection that will be released in October.  The other day, I wrote The End to Maggie North's women's fiction story, Pieces of  Blue. In recent months, I've withdrawn the Second Chances Series from its publisher so that it's no longer available. 

What now?

I pin so much on age these days...actually, these years. I no longer get down on the floor because I can't get up without help. I gave up on having a waistline. Nine-thirty is the new midnight. My kids are actually my age now, because they can't possibly be as old as their birth certificates insist they are. My birth certificate, however, is on a stone tablet, so...

This particular place I am, though, has little to do with age. 

In first grade, the earliest time I was ever actually by myself, unattended by either parents or siblings, I was wobbly and scared and I think fragile. I don't remember anything about that first day other than opening the first little Dick and Jane paperback reader and seeing the word Look. I read that over and over, and I thought, What now?

When I graduated from high school, with no possible way to even consider further education, I got a job and left home, seeking independence at any cost. I went through numerous jobs, went back home a time or two and left again. I loved being on my own, although I wasn't good at it. 

Life as a young, single woman and then a young single mom was full of perils, potholes, and pinpricks that kept me both certain I would shatter at whatever the next thing was and determined that I would not. I wrote in notebooks, long destroyed, about what was ahead of me in my life gone out of control What now?

When I got serious about writing fiction, the first 50 or so rejections sent me into a tailspin I thought I'd never find my way out of. One story I've told often enough it doesn't bear repeating left me unable to write a single printable word for months on end. Before I'd ever been published, I was broken as a writer. What now? I thought, staring at the blank screen in front of me. What do I do now?

I wrote. I'm not sure what I wrote or how good or publishable it was, but I wrote. Soon, long before I sold my first book, my fragility became a thing of the past...for a while. Words were magic to me, from then until now. 

Even though I'm feeling fragile and uncertain...even if I can't even think of a new series name for the Second Chance books...even if I get 50 or so rejections on Pieces of Blue, I know what to do now. There it is right in front of me, the real magic--the blank page we both curse and revere. 

Fragile? Me? Don't be ridiculous.