Yes. It was terrible.

One of my first teachers asked me one day, out of the blue, “Have you ever thought about being a famous novelist?” The way he said it made me realize he’d seen something about my future. At that point I had not thought about it just the way he said it. Because he was someone I trusted, I began to think more seriously about it.

After looking at the options and realizing if I did find an agent, then a publisher, it would still be up to two years before the book was published, and everybody else would get most of the proceeds. Plus I'd lose control. No contest, in my opinion. I went with Createspace and Smashwords.

I love good mysteries, thrillers, and some time travel. Just read Forward to Camelot by Susan Sloate and Kevin FInn which I read in two days, it was so good.

I usually have to stay there and think about it for quite a while.

In the early ‘90s I received a big push. I began to get the beginning of a story, seeing it as a movie that just ran in my head and kept going, over and over. Finally, I decided to write it down and hoped that maybe it would stop. I wrote it down and that part stopped, but more came, then more and more, until I had a book. I really learned how to write doing that and realized I needed some classes and feedback, if I was going to get serious about writing and hopefully, publishing. That particular story has not been published.

I became interested in spirituality and metaphysics when I was about 30 years old and as part of that I was able to learn what some of my past lives have been. There were lives in Egypt and Greece, and those were lives as wandering teachers or where I did some kind of healing work, using color to do healing, for example in Egypt. Healing with colors is still done today. There were lives in the Southwest part of the U.S. with some of the Native American tribes there, one life as a Navajo woman where I fell off a ladder to my death.

Years later, I began working with a very gifted spiritual teacher and healer who has created the most detailed and powerful method of healing that exists today. Some of the techniques used in this method, called Christa Healing, are shamanic techniques. As I continued my work with her, and learned her method of healing, we uncovered past lives in South America when I had been a shaman, and sometimes in very dark circumstances. There was an event from one of those lifetimes I still had to heal, and for a while, I didn’t know how to do that. I started researching shamans, as I already knew quite a bit about rainforest herbs, and years before, I’d learned about a particular tribe in a certain area of Venezuela, so I researched that. I called on all that knowledge I already had, and before long Rafael Alejandro Santiago Silva, rain forest shaman and medical doctor was born. Of course, he has his own problem to solve with anthropologist Christina Czyzinski, from Minnesota, of course. Eventually it all ended up in “Cape of the Red Jaguar,” the first book in the Spirit Song series. Later, I found out that writing that book had worked out the situation from that lifetime as a shaman.

Finally, I knew this is what my particular purpose is, to write about these topics in an entertaining way, writing about characters people would love, including real information about the rainforest and it's healing plants, the Pemon Indians there, and Venezuela itself, and creating stories that made them keep the light on longer at night, so I just kept going. I truly didn’t know just what genre it was going to be in the beginning stages, other than fiction. There still isn’t a genre that I feel covers it accurately. And now I’m surprised at how many people love this kind of fiction.

During the writing process, certain words or a phrase will jump out at me, and that usually becomes the title. The name of the series came from some of the research I did on shamans. A spirit song is actually the song that a shaman sings as he is working on someone. Shamans often receive these songs during their journeying process when they contact other beings or the spirits of the plants in the rain forest.

Years ago while writing down that movie in my head that kept playing, I mentioned it to a friend. She wanted to see it. I very reluctantly gave her the first 30 pages and she loved it so much that she eventually decided to be a literary agent. She got it read by New York editors who had nice things to say, but they weren’t buying. Even so, that entire experience was so confidence building, it kept me writing. That is the kind of friends writers need.

When I finally held that first book in my hands. Nothing else like that.

I have an ace designer, who loves to do book covers. I give him the main elements of the story and he goes from there. There is a lot of back and forth, but he always comes through with something smashing.

If you absolutely love it, then absolutely write it no matter who tells you differently. Then hire an editor or find a good writers critique group.