Why Women Write

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Writing a novel is part endurance race, part spiritual reckoning.  You cry at sentences that won’t behave. You mutter to yourself.  You fall in love with characters who refuse to do what you tell them. Part detective, part historian, part therapist, and part caffeine addict. 

Some days it feels like flying. Most days, it feels like crawling. Sometimes it feels like I do it to honor those who can't express themselves. 

There was a time—not that long ago—when women weren’t even allowed to publish their words. 

They wrote in secret. They wrote in the quiet hours after everyone else was asleep. I write for them, those who had to hide themselves to publish.

Mary Ann Evans became George Eliot. The Brontë sisters became Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. They disguised themselves not out of vanity, but survival. Because a woman with opinions was “unseemly.” 

Women writers hid behind names that weren’t theirs because the world wouldn’t take a woman’s words seriously. And yet, they wrote anyway.

That Fire Still Burns

Fast forward to now. We can publish with one click. We can write under our own name, in our own voice. Still, we have our doubts; I have my doubts.

 “Who am I to write this?” 

“Who am I to think anyone will care?” 

The ghosts of doubt still linger. And yet, women write.
 

Every woman who’s ever put pen to paper has felt the lava of an urge to express oneself bubbling up, an idea that flickers in your mind, briefly at first. Then it takes hold. 

From Charlotte Brontë to the woman who sits in her pajamas staring at a half-finished draft on her laptop, something inside whispers, "You must write."

The Long Gallop Home

I just finished my first novel.

It took over ten years— years of research, reading, and digging into the past, months of rough drafts, and then several years of multiple versions of the story that had to be told.  Writing, doubting, deleting, rewriting, doubting again. Many chewed pencils.

So, Why  Bother?

We do it because we have to.

I do it because I have to. Because the story won’t leave me alone. Because it hums to me at night and will not let me sleep until Ilet it out.

I do it because the time has finally come.

Devils on Horseback, my debut novel, is set for release in the summer of  2026. Loosely based on a true family story and set during the Civil War, it's a story of danger, resilience, and the impossible choices women had to make to stay alive and protect their loved ones when the world fell apart.

So yes… it took me a while. But oh, reader, just wait until you read it!