It started with a note posted on my car visor – Make Your Truth Mine, God. I’d written it down out of some sane compulsion, a reaction to things in the world I could no longer ignore: the Patriot Act and all its constitutional fallout; an announcement that the government was considering postponing the 2004 election as a response to (pause for irony) terrorist threats; the jumbling of news and opinion; the intertwining of rhetoric and rage. It seemed I was one of very few people who noticed. This is the stuff from which my novel Veracity was born, though I wish it hadn’t taken such a crisis to lull me from my stupor and turn me into my best self – a writer.

I’d wanted to tell stories as soon as my feet hit the ground, but I was also a first born with a sense of pragmatism and my little girl dreams were quickly relegated to the Another Lifetime closet of my mind. My thinking was this – a starving artist couldn’t raise children happily or fully and I knew, in addition to telling stories, I wanted kids. So, on the day I wrote myself this note about truth, I was working for a corporation, building departments. Providing for my daughters and doing a great job of showing them what settling looked like. I’d forgotten that there are many ways to starve.

I was on a jog, thinking about my request for truth, and why I’d made it. How do we take our-selves back? How do we again become the sole owners of our thoughts and refuse the idea that the loudest angriest person in the room knows best? How do we make standing up for what we believe in the norm and stop risking our souls for a little promised safety? Then I started thinking about my oldest daughter, and realized that, under the guise of good parenting, I’d been stealing hope from her. Teaching her that dreams aren’t to be nourished. That the ideals behind Thank God It’s Friday and Working To Retire were normal.

Make Your Truth Mine.

BAM.

Veracity came into my head, full-force, like a download. It would be a story about a future society stripped of language and, via this theft, self-awareness. It would be a story about a woman who thought she’d been providing her child safety but had, instead, been insuring her daughter’s receipt of the same. It would be a story about the value of truth, and that corruption can have no effect on an educated mind. I raced back home and had a conversation with my husband.

I quit my corporate job, wrote a first draft of Veracity, and went to the 2006 Maui Writer’s Con-ference where Veracity won the Rupert Hughes Award. As a result, I got an agent. The day I got the call that there were editors interested, I had a biopsy on my left breast, and the day we signed the contract with Simon and Schuster, I got confirmation that it was cancer. I often look back in wonder at this succession of events, most of them, the result of a deal I’d made with God about clarity, and realize how hard it would have been to hear about my cancer, had I not finally opened up my little girl closet. Had I not shown my daughter how to dream out loud. Had I not gotten my story into the world. There were other tripping points (most significantly, the death of my Grandmother on the final day of edits), but these have served as tipping points, too. Reminders to keep from getting clouded.

Veracity, for me, was a wonderful vehicle on the most rewarding journey I imagine a writer could have taken. I have been overwhelmed by the love and attention its received from others who are interested in such things as realized dreams and a desire to reacquaint ourselves with what we believe and, maybe more importantly, why we believe it. I am now cancer-free, I should add, and still keep that card about truth close at hand.

ENTER TO WIN A COPY OF VERACITY ON THIS WEEK’S GIVEAWAY!