My Story
Having gone through some pretty rough patches, many people told me I needed to write a book about my life. I figured that would bore the shit outta people, so I just gave the main character in ABWTD my story. A way for people to connect to her and to me and not write a memoire. Maybe one day the memoire will come. Not today.
“Everyone has a story that is slumbering within them. It is the writers of the world that hear when they awaken.” -Inara Gage
My story is one of tragedy, resilience, and triumph. It is the story of learning how to survive the darkest moments of my life without letting them define the rest of it.
My son nearly died at birth because of a rare muscle disorder. Three months after marrying his father, I learned I was pregnant with a very wanted baby, and through that pregnancy, I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. I could not save my daughter. She became my guardian angel while I fought for my own life.
A year after I finished chemotherapy, my husband left me for another woman. I turned to alcohol to cope and nearly lost myself to it. Then, only a month after I got sober, my mom, my best friend, was diagnosed with cancer. After a long battle with squamous cell carcinoma, I lost her too.
Through all of it, I kept writing.
I wrote and published my first series, The Sorenya Chronicles, only to watch my publisher collapse. When I tried to keep my publishing dream alive through a self-publishing company, I later discovered I had fallen into the hands of a company under the Author Solutions umbrella. Once again, something I had worked so hard for seemed to fall apart.
After my divorce, I realized that if I wanted to rebuild my writing career, I needed to understand how to market myself instead of relying on someone else to do it for me. So I went back to school.
Today, I am cancer-free, nine years sober, and earned my MBA in Marketing in May 2023. I have new books on the horizon, a new pen name, and a career I am rebuilding entirely on my own terms.
I am starting over, but I am not starting empty-handed. I carry every loss, every lesson, and every version of myself that refused to quit.
I am still chasing the dream of becoming a bestselling author. And if my life has taught me anything, it is that I know how to fight for the things I refuse to lose.
Cancer did not make me lie down and die. Neither will failure.
I will keep building, keep writing, and keep chasing this dream for as long as I have breath left to do it.