Wings of Glass

I think this is my favorite book so far. Wings of Glass
tells the story of Penny Taylor, a young wife who feels trapped and alone in a
physically and emotionally abusive marriage. Besides her low self-esteem, she
feels her Christian faith doesn’t allow for divorce. It’s not until she meets
two women—one a southern socialite and the other a Sudanese cleaning woman—that
her eyes are opened to the truth of her situation and she begins her journey to
healing and redemption.

As a little girl, I watched my mother being physically
abused by her husband and then later, two of my sisters enter abusive
relationship after abusive relationship and I thought that would never be me. .
. until the day my boyfriend hit me for the first time and I began to make
excuses for him. I know the mindset of someone who gets into and stays in an
abusive relationship, because I’ve been there myself. It’s taken me years, and
a lot of reading, praying, and talking to get to the heart of what brought me
and kept me in toxic relationships and I want to pass on some of what I learned
that helped me find boundaries and recovery from a codependent mindset and most
of all healing.

It’s my hope and prayer that those who are in abusive
relationships will begin to see that the problem lies with them as much as with
the abuser. That’s something I railed against when friends suggested it. I
wasn’t the one with the problem! I was no doormat who enabled abuse or
addiction… or was I?

I also hope that those who have never understood the mindset
of victims would better comprehend the intricacies of codependency and be
better able to minister to these women and men. And of course I’d love it if
young women would read this before they ever enter their first romantic
relationship to have their eyes open to how abuse almost always progresses and
be able to see the red flags early.

Each of the characters has a little of me in them or vice
versa. I think years ago I was more like Penny, though tougher in many regards,
at least I thought so. I’d like to think now I’m a little more Callie Mae.
Because I’ve lived through what I have and have found healing, I can see in
others the path that will lead to healing and the one that will lead to
destruction. The difficult part once you’ve found healing is remembering that
you can’t do it for others. You can offer advice, but you can’t make anyone
take it. Each person has to learn in their own time, in their own way.

I absolutely love Fatimah. She had such a great sense of
humor and didn’t care what anyone thought except those who really mattered. She
was really quite self-actualized. She was so much fun to write and I actually
find myself missing her presence.

Favorite: making
my own schedule. I love when I’m feeling bad one day knowing that I don’t have
to punch a clock. I can just take the day off and then work harder the next. Of
course, there’s a lot of other things I love about writing, like allowing
others to consider another point of view that may be far different from their
own.

Least favorite: There’s a joke that when you work for
yourself you at least get to pick which eighteen hours of the day you want.
That’s true. Working from home means I’m always at work. I work from about 7:30
am until about eight at night most days. Under deadline, it’s worse. Truly
understanding how much the success of a book rides on the shoulders of the
author is a blessing and a curse. Because I get that no one is more invested in
the success of my books than me, I put in a LOT of time on the
publicity/marketing end of things. It’s tiring but an investment that I think
pays off in the long run.

Never say never, but I doubt it. I had considered reworking
some but having gone back and re-read them, I realized they weren’t published
for good reason. They just didn’t work. Now, there is one story I’m resurrecting
characters from for a story I should be writing next, but the plotline is
completely different. I started out writing suspensel but as my reading tastes
changed, so did my writing tastes. I don’t see myself doing suspense again any
time soon.

Honestly, I’m a pretty quirky person. The older I get, the
more I embrace those quirks. I think everyone is quirky really. As a student of
human nature, I pick up on those and like to exaggerate them in my fiction. I
also like to surround myself with quirky people. My husband is quirky, my kids
are quirky and so are my friends. Often in life, especially when we’re young,
we hate about ourselves what makes us different, when really those are the
things we should be embracing. Different is interesting. Different is
beautiful.

Speaking of quirky… I read a book a few years back that was
so different that it made me want to try something like that. The book was a
big-time bestseller, Jonathan Strange and
Mr Norrell. What turned me on about that book were the characters. They
were quirky to an extreme. In contemporary women’s fiction, I can get away with
a certain amount of quirk. but I’m always having to play it down because it’s
so over the top. In a fantasy, you can be as over the top as you dare. I’d love
to play around with something like that one day and just let my freak flag fly!
Will I? Probably not unless I use a penname. I realize readers have certain
expectations and I wouldn’t want anyone to feel mislead. We’ll see. There’s
lots in life I want to do but since I only get a hundred or so years (if I’m
lucky), time won’t allow for every rabbit hole.

My advice would be not to follow too closely in anyone’s
footsteps. Yes, there is a certain path all writers find themselves on. There
are certain things that we must all do like learning to write well, figuring
out platform, going to writers conferences to meet the gatekeepers and figure
out the way things have to be formatted and submitted and all that sort of
thing. But it’s okay to veer off the path too and forge your own. There are
those who have self-published who have found great success.

There are those who have written about subjects that they
were told no one wanted to read about and found success. It’s smart to figure
out what others have done before you to make them successful, but alter the
formula to suit your needs and passions. It’s okay to be different, in fact, I
think great success and maybe even happiness depends upon it. And by all means,
read Novel Rocket.com and leave comments. It helps not only encourage those
authors who have taken the time out of their day to teach us, but it also
connects you to the writing community. Community is important.