Ever since I was a teenager, I wanted to write a book. But, children, work, and life intervened. So a year ago, with some money in the bank, and my marketing business fizzling (how do you compete with the global workforce when someone in Brazil is willing to charge $200 for the same services I used to charge $5,000 for?), I realized it was “now or never.” Last Friday, a man dressed in brown walked up to my front door and handed me a package. I walked into my house, unwrapped it, and was momentarily stunned. I knew the UPS package was coming. I had been waiting two days for it. I tore it open, and there it was: my very first novel. No matter that I am an indie author and it’s self-published. I could hold it, leaf through it, and see the dedication. What a thrill to read the words “A Novel by Victoria Brown” on the front cover. In a New York Times article by Joseph Epstein, he wrote that 81 percent of Americans say they want to write a book. But I also read somewhere that only 3 percent who start out to write a book actually finish it. I started out slow. I won’t say I had writer’s block—I always felt as if I were moving forward. I had a rough outline, and I knew the basic plot, but the first cut was more like a prosy outline than a real book. It was about 40,000 or 50,000 words. I had my first complete draft done by the beginning of December. Twelve rewrites, a professional editor, copyediting, and several proofreaders later, it was finally published on May 11.