Does My Family read My Books? What Do you Think?

Not my family but they sure look like happy Readers! From DepositPhoto

My immediate family is extremely supportive of my writing, probably because I’ve literally been writing since any of them have known me. I first became published in January 2012 but that’s just one milestone on my lifelong need to tell my stories, starting at age 7.

My late husband and I met in the tenth grade. It was common knowledge among our friends that I wrote science fiction and he was always my biggest booster and champion. After we were married, he’d do whatever it took to carve out time for me to write in the evenings and on weekends (I had that demanding day job at NASA/JPL) although sadly when he died, I kind of put away the novel I was working on for a very long time and concentrated all my energy on being the single working mother of two very young children. He always read whatever I wrote and was maybe the only person I ever let read something while I was still writing it. As a general rule, I never let people read my works in progress. Ever.

My daughters read my books when the first draft is complete. They’ve just always known that “Mom writes” so it’s an accepted fact of our lives.

I’ll never forget the first time I gave them one of my novels to read, hot off the printer in the living room and years before I was published, and I’ll never forget how astounded they were that their mother had actually written all this. They were teenagers and sat up pretty much all night reading the book and really enjoyed it, which was so gratifying to me. My genres aren’t their preferred favorites but as I mentioned above, they read everything I write.

My brother is my extremely devoted fan and reads each book the moment they go up on Amazon after editing and formatting. He gives me a detailed review and critique which is only for my eyes and which I value so much since we grew up together in a house where my Dad loved science fiction and passed that joy of reading the genre onto us both.

My parents both passed away many years ago.

As far as my extended family, I believe they’re proud to have a published author in the family (because they’ve told me that numerous times and I have no reason to doubt them LOL) but no one is a particular fan of my genres. My closest cousin on my mother’s side sort of dutifully reads each new book and then gives them to the local library, which works for me! 

I once sent an assortment of the paperback books, both scifi and ancient Egyptian, to my godparents who are still alive, with an invitation to pass them along to any of my huge family of cousins on my Dad’s side who might be interested. The eventual, tactful response was that everyone had sampled at least one of the free books and congratulations again on being published but gee, no one here is a romance reader really.

And that’s perfectly fine.

People like the genres of books they like and at least everyone in that part of the family was open to sampling mine. (I think my aunt did say something about the story she sampled being a bit steamy for her, which is mildly hilarious because I write pretty middle of the road sex scenes but hey, she’s known me since I was a baby.)

I don’t write my books for my relatives, or my friends. I write the stories for me, to tell you the truth. Then I’m happy to put them out there in the world on the ebook platforms and thrilled that the books have found an audience of readers who do enjoy romance, science fiction and trips to ancient Egypt.

Here are just a few of my 20+ published titles, ranging from the first, Priestess of the Nile, to the most recent, Mateer, and a little bit of everything in between.