Well, it’s official—at least two of my readers enjoyed the stories in my new book, Elvis Saves a Marriage and Other Short Stories!

Having a reader –or many readers—enjoy what you write is the ultimate reward for most writers, I think.

It makes all the hours you invest in a book worth it: the nights you don’t sleep because you’re working out plot twists, the many times you rethink a character’s actions or dialog, and the agony of multiple rewrites. And, of course, the editing—the part of writing that separates the serious writer from the dabbler.

By the time a book is published, it has been scrutinized, edited, polished, read and re-read until the author can almost recite it by heart.

Writing is a solitary activity. That means that you have to be motivated to keep writing no matter what, even when self doubt rears its ugly head. Even when you can’t quite make the words say what you mean.

And when you’re finished you must be open to suggestions from others, be it a writer’s critique group, an editor, agent, or all of the aforementioned.

After you’ve gone through all of the work, the fine-tuning and fought off the self doubt and convinced yourself that people will pay to read what you have produced—you most likely will make very little money from all of your effort.

In other words, it’s not a pursuit for sissies.

So, the obvious conclusion is that writers write because they love it and feel that they have something special to share with the world.

That’s how I feel about my latest offering—a collection of short stories, Elvis Saves a Marriage and Other Short Stories, that my publisher describes as “slice of life stories that cover the gamut of human emotion” with “engaging characters and surprise endings.”