I started writing my first book when I was reading a book by Marshall Cook entitled Freeing Your Creativity. I would write a chapter and then let Mom read it. Mom wrote when she was younger and then got married and had ten children. She had no time to write then. She saw her dream come true through me.

The book slowed down when I ran my own newspaper out of the basement of my home using InDesign. The Pike River Community News came out every other week. The Plymouth Review did the printing for me.

I continued to write until I had two strokes in one night on March 31, 2005. At that point I had no "N" in my alphabet for quite awhile. I didn't know whether I was "writing", "righting" or "riteing". And the more I thought about it the worse it got. I started therapy to learn how to swallow, walk, talk, think, remember, and undo the paralysis in my face and throat. I had no gag reflex. On the 27th of May my mother passed away and I didn't pick up the writing process again for months. I started writing again the following year when I moved up to the U.P.

In 2007 I moved down to Tucson, Arizona and did a lot of writing on the book. In February of 2008 my son passed away. I wrote about death, and grief, and about my son and all that transpired with the funeral and afterwards. I could not even think of writing on my book. It was about a year later when I convinced myself that I had gotten so far into the book that I just had to finish it. It was first published in 2010 by Magellan Books.