This is it, my friends. In April I released my final book, a story about survival and living with PTSD called One Reason to Live. To date, I’ve published 12 books, and I think that’s a good place to stop.

My journey as an author has been a tumultuous one, and I frankly just don’t have the energy or motivation to continue. Marketing is soul-destroying for me, and even when I hire someone, the results are disappointing at best. Never worth the time or money, in my experience. Certainly not worth the stress.

It saddens me some because One Reason to Live has gotten such glowing reviews from editorial reviewers and readers alike, but even a string of 5-star reviews get lost in the din. It’s virtually impossible to get it in front of enough interested readers without a marketing budget in the six-figures at least.

For this memoir, I gave it my all. Eight years in the making. Over $15k spent on editors, proofreaders, query polishing, marketing, design services, and ads. Hundreds of queries out to agents, all to either not reply or tell me they didn’t connect with my work. After all, a memoir from a non-celebrity with virtually no platform is a very hard sell to publishers. I can hardly blame them, and I expected nothing else. Still, I gave it my all.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve had some successes and many failures in my writing career. My former husband and I made a strong start with our Rowan of the Wood series, and I found some niche success in my Steampunk Romance Avalon Revisited, published under O. M. Grey. A wave of traumatic events spanning a 2-year period stole my budding writing career and ultimately contributed to the end of my marriage, forcing me to rebuild my life—the subject of One Reason to Live.

My published works speak to a few readers, and I appreciate every single one of them. However, a living one cannot make from a limited readership, and I have come to accept that I either don’t have the capacity/talent to connect with readers through social media or I just don’t have anything interesting to say! Without an extensive online platform (which I have exhaustively tried to build over the years and have failed time and again), it’s clear that I will not have a financially successful career as an author, and it’s okay!

My life is so very full in other ways since I’ve rebuilt it, as outlined in One Reason to Live.

I travel extensively. I have a wonderful job as a technical writer with a company with offices based in Paris and Cambridge. I’ve moved to London for at least a year, which has been a lifelong goal. I’ve had a lovely relationship with a kind man for the past 5 years, and it continues. I’ve fulfilled so many of my dreams, and there is much life left to live.

If you choose to read One Reason to Live, or any of my other works, I hope they speak to you and bring you some semblance of joy or sense of comfort in your own journey.

May you find peace.