I’ve been MIA for the past two weeks. I could blame the whirlwind pace of my life (Hah!), but even after all these years of writing, it never gets easier.

To a writer, a blank piece of paper can be as frightening as jumping off a cliff: Will I die? Will I sprout wings and fly? Is there a team of hot firefighters holding a net at the bottom? Will I think of anything to write?

If you are about to write me off as a flash in the pan, wait just one darn minute. I have been writing. I have. I’ve managed to get 5,000 words of my new book written over the past 10 days. This means that the first 55 pages of Luck Is a Lady is complete. If you have ever written anything, and I mean anything — letter, article, advertisement, whatever — you know that the beginning is the hardest. Once you get rolling, things begin to flow.

For me, the first section means layering all the characters and their GMCs (goals, motivations, conflicts) so that I can spend the rest of the book (last 275 pages), unraveling everything until we reach a satisfactory conclusion. In other words, the fun part of writing a book.

That wasn’t so hard.

Mari