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"My plan has always been to combine fiction writing with a flexible work schedule so that I can be home with my children when they get home from school. Now I'm finally getting the chance to make this happen. Walt, you're my inspiration. And you are right, it is a wonderful feeling to have one's life back!"--Dorothy Phaire

Time is a finite entity. Each day if we're lucky we get 1,440 minutes of it and what doesn't get put to good use is gone forever. Finding time to write has always been and still is my biggest challenge. That's why time is so valuable to me.

I've always dreamed of having a professional career in writing. My pre-teen years were spent as a hermit in my room where I read all the classics, wrote poetry, painted in oil and acrylics on canvas, and designed my own paper doll cutouts (complete with shoes and wardrobe!). In fact, instead of being sent to my room for punishment my parents would make me go outside and play. All this childhood carefree time to imagine and create evaporated when I became an adult.

In college I majored in Education and then pursued a technical career in the field of Information Systems solely due to its security and nice income. My plan was to write on the side. But as my skills grew in programming and technology, my confidence lapsed on the literary and artistic side. Adult worries and responsibilities ate away at my time and consumed my concentration. There was no room for artistic or self-indulgent pursuits like writing fiction.

I told myself that I would get back to writing when things settled down and I had more time. But that never happened. As a full-time systems analyst, wife, mother, and home manager, my workday did not slow down until after midnight. In 1993 I realized it would have to be now or never. So I begin stealing away 15 minutes, then 30, then 60 minutes from the early morning hours when the house was quiet to work on my first serious writing project. It took a year to complete my first novel entitled, Claudia which was so bad I wouldn't want anyone alive or dead to see it today. I stashed Claudia away in the file cabinet as a learning exercise and never submitted it for publication. In 1994, my midnight minutes of writing produced another novel called, Beating on Dead Bones. This time I eagerly submitted Beating on Dead Bones to sixteen agents and promptly received sixteen rejections. Later, I discovered that sixteen rejections amount to a miniscule number in the publishing business. Since 1996 I acquired the habit of writing nearly everyday and have learned a great deal more about developing characters and writing good narrative prose. It took three years to produce what I now consider my first real novel, Almost Out of Love. Finding time to write consistently and regularly every day is still a major challenge for me. But now it feels weird if I skip more than three days without writing. Writing has become a welcomed habit.