“Every Journey Begins with the First Step”

I submitted my cozy mystery manuscript to a publisher today! Every time I submit for publication, it feels the same. My mind shrieks “Wait! Wait! Did you forget to…?” I go back and check. Is it edited well enough? Is the format still okay? Did I leave any embarrassing typos? Will the editor read it? It looks okay and press the “send” button. My stomach lurches. I breathe out. Then I find a typo.

In December 1998, I moved to Harney County, Oregon. After four years of my husband commuting 1000 miles, back and forth from his job in Oregon to our home in Idaho, we rented an old ranch house on the edge of the basin for our family. We were down to our four youngest children by that time. There wasn’t much for me to do for a while except drive the kids to and from school and activities, and grocery shop and do laundry twenty miles away in town. While I was alone each day, I observed wildlife and memorized the landscape.

A red-tailed hawk took up residence in a tall tree outside the living room window, and small songbirds visited the old apple orchard in the backyard. In February, I saw twelve bald eagles within one mile of the house. As spring approached, rattlesnakes slithered onto the asphalt roads, basking in their warmth. In the basement of the old house, a frog croaked, breaking into my thought and inspiring my first poetry in Oregon. By the next fall, the seed for Hunter on the Sly had germinated and taken root, I began drafting it.

When I became a professor, I wanted my students to come into my office, see something they would remember, and take it with them beyond the university. I found a sign in a bookstore in Burns, Oregon, with a modified quotation from Chinese philospher Lao Tzu, and I have borrowed it for today’s blog title. Journeys are adventures, and they require that first step.