30 Years of Writing This Month

At 38, I had an Awakening.

In 1994, I had a full psychotherapy office in Charleston, SC. I was between clients, staring out the window. In that moment, I envisioned my funeral. It would be packed. All my former clients would come. I was beloved. Yet I realized that I had neglected to do the one thing I was truly meant to do—write.

Six months later, I moved from Charleston, South Carolina to Asheville, North Carolina to write. I had no idea what that entailed. I just knew that it was now or never. My daughters were in middle school. I was a single mother. I knew no one in Asheville. I didn’t know the first thing about writing fiction or novels. But over the next decade I learned. I went to conferences, writers groups, and workshops. I wrote in the mornings and took part time jobs that I could do in the evenings. Along with my child support, I was able to pull it off

What I thought would take a year or two, stretched into a decade worth of rejections from publishers, even with a literary agent. It wasn’t until 2012 that I had a significant breakthrough. In fact, it was a game-changer.

My novel, The Secret Sense of Wildflower, was reviewed by a big-deal New York reviewer, Kirkus Reviews. It was given a starred review, which was only given to books of “exceptional merit.” Later that year, it was voted a Best Book of 2012. I kept thinking there must have been some kind of mistake.

Any day, I expected Kirkus to email me and take it back! Thankfully, they didn’t.

In the years before that, I felt like the only person left who knew my dream and that still believed in me. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I believed with all my heart that this writing thing was what I was meant to be doing. I believed I had stories to tell that only I could tell. I believed that I had something to say, and that the readers I sought—none at the time—would somehow find me.

In 2015, after Temple Secrets was published, I finally began to make a decent living at writing—this was twenty years after I started. I called it my get-rich-slow plan.

And now, thirty years later, I show no signs of stopping, even though book sales have slowed from a gush to a trickle. Now, I’m writing my first mystery with Honey Honeycutt as the main character. She is a retired psychotherapist and amateur sleuth who hangs out at the Senior Center in Jonesborough and lives on the farm she grew up on.

Paid subscribers received chapters 4 and 5 today, a rare “first look” as a perk for supporting my writing, so I can keep going. It will be available to everyone in paperback and ebook later this year. Fingers crossed.

Have you ever had a dream that you didn’t give up on?

In the meantime, stay warm, and thanks so much for reading my books!

Who is Susan Gabriel?

Susan is an acclaimed, bestselling author. Her novel, The Secret Sense of Wildflower, was voted a “best book of 2012” by Kirkus Reviews. The Wildflower Trilogy is The Secret Sense of Wildflower (book 1). Lily’s Song is book 2. And Daisy’s Fortune is book 3. Her second trilogy is Temple Secrets (book 1 and an Amazon bestseller), Gullah Secrets is book 2, and Tea Leaf Secrets (book 3). She has written several standalone novels, including Trueluck Summer, which takes place in Charleston in 1964, and Grace, Grits, and Ghosts: Southern short stories.