Writing Without a Reader is Like a Kiss Without a Partner

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I do so enjoy getting fan mail! How wonderful to wake up to a message such as this: I just finished Daughter Am I, and have to tell you how very much fun I had on that ride. I’ve always been a fan of happy endings, most especially if the characters are willing to put time and energy into helping make it happen. I loved coming full circle. I loved when Crunchy collected his latest stray — “Can we keep her?” I loved seeing in print “Money could buy happiness.” What a wonderful story, from start to finish. What an awesome gift. Thank you.

I hope I didn’t include any spoilers. All I could think of was sharing this woman’s enthusiasm for my latest novel.

For the most part, despite writers’ groups and online discussions, writing is a solitary occupation. You spend years (okay, only eleven months for Daughter Am I, but who’s counting) writing a book, months rewriting it, and perhaps a year or two editing it. During all that time you have only your vision to sustain you. You wonder if anyone will ever buy the book. You wonder if anyone will like it. You don’t need acclaim, because writing is an end in itself. Still, as John Cheever, said, “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.”

Readers connect the circle, and in an odd sort of way, they finish the book. They take your vision and make it their own. Priceless.

Daughter Am I: When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents — grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born — she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead. Along the way she accumulates a crew of feisty octogenarians — former gangsters and friends of her grandfather. She meets and falls in love Tim Olson, whose grandfather shared a deadly secret with her great-grandfather. Now Mary and Tim need to stay one step ahead of the killer who is desperate to dig up that secret.

Daughter Am I is Pat Bertram’s third novel to be published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC. Also available are More Deaths Than One and A Spark of Heavenly Fire.

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Tags: writing, Daughter Am I, John Cheever, fan mail