Magic Moments

I’ve just had one of those weekends a writer dreams of—an experience that makes all the lonely hours of working alone worthwhile: first I received a message from a friend telling me that a dear friend of hers had just passed away and in her last weeks the only things she had wanted to read were my books.


That is pretty humbling for a start. Then I was one of the main speakers at the Orange County Festival of Women Authors. Five hundred plus ladies listening to me, laughing at my jokes and afterward lining up to buy my books and have them signed. And not just one book. Some of them had bought the whole series of Molly books, all nine of them! I felt as if I had magically morphed into Mary Higgins Clark.

And then a crowning moment: a woman introduced herself as an Episcopal priest and told me that she’d used Molly Murphy as her sermon last week—and presented me with a CD of the sermon. Isn’t that something? I’ve never been used as a sermon before—not that I know of, anyway. Of course I haven’t played the CD yet so the sermon could be saying, “beware that you don’t turn out like Molly Murphy.” But I don’t think so. She was an extremely nice woman and clearly liked my books.

So this is a weekend I’ll preserve in amber, to be brought out when I’m sitting at my computer asking myself ‘why am I doing this when it’s all rubbish anyway?” I don’t know of any writer who is confident that what they are writing is good. We need to be reassured that we are writing something worthwhile. I guess most of us have fragile egos.

So if any of the ladies from Orange County are reading this—thank you for a wonderful experience. Toastmaster at Malice and now this in one month. It doesn’t get much better than this.  Now I'm home and it's back to laundry and a leak under the sink again. Sigh. Cinderella is back.