Goodbye to Jeanne Howard Writes

I don't even remember the exact year.

It was during my tenure at Lower Camden County Regional High School in Winslow Township that I started learning the basics of building a website. So it must have been in the mid-90s.

In 2001, I published a romance novel, Seasons of Forgetting, using iUniverse as the company to produce the book. I thought it was a masterpiece that would bring me Nora Robertsesque fame and fortune.

It was no masterpiece. It went nowhere and no one knew it existed.

So I built my first website, Jeanne Howard Writes, using the pseudonym I thought was just catchy enough to draw attention. Never mind there was already a famous Howard, Linda by name, who was in a league far above mine.The site was pretty and so was I in the glamour shot I'd paid for. It was hard to recognize myself in that professionally made-up and dressed gal in the head shot.

When I wrote the second novel, Jared's Promise, and signed on with Wings ePress to produce the ebook and the paperback, I brought Seasons of Forgetting with me. 
It got a new cover and a fresh edit and was by far a better book than the first attempt.
My friends, and even a lot of people I didn't know, read both books and claimed they stayed up at night until the finished them, piles of damp tissues next to their chairs. Bless them, they kept my confidence in myself as a writer alive for a very long time.

But, I don't write novels any more. After the second one, whatever Muse that had visited me fled, taking storylines, ideas and new characters with her to gift to others. Instead of writing, I spend hours each day editing the writing of others, all of them more versatile, prolific and determined to tell their stories than I was.

But I kept the old website alive, reluctant to toss all the work it took to design it into the computer's trash bin. xUntil yesterday. Yesterday, I did it.

With one keystroke, I sent it into oblivion. It wasn't as sad an occasion as I thought it would be.

It was just necessary to turn the page, to look ahead instead of back.