There is a freedom that comes along with being single. After my divorce, I spent my newly free time jumping back into my manuscript. I had just discovered Ray LaMontagne, not only was he ridiculously talented, his debut album, Trouble carried the sound and mood of Beneath the Tree so perfectly, that I used it as my revision soundtrack. It inspired a lot of the tone and imagery that ended up in the final manuscript, including creating wild horses as a major running theme throughout the book.
But getting back into my book wasn't all rainbows and moonbeams. I was confronted by the long road to publication looming in front of me. As a newly single mother, I needed a shorter, more certain route to an income from my writing. And more than anything, I wanted to be able to support myself and my daughter doing what I loved. It was from this space of furiously revising in my basement at 2:00am and dreaming of how I might overcome my publishing dilemma that sent me down the rabbit hole of what would become 9R455R0075.