This week I took part in Puget Sound Business Journal’s Mentoring Monday program, the Seattle version of a nation wide program that brings successful women in business together to speak to and encourage mostly younger women interested in making changes in their lives.  I did it because Patti Payne (yes, THAT Patti Payne, the one we all know and love) is a master when it comes to twisting arms.  She even convinced me to hang around in Seattle for three extra days and miss Bill’s birthday celebration in Tucson to take part in the event.

Patti and I have a long history.  She was the ONLY Seattle area media type (KOMO Radio back then, I believe) who interviewed me after the initial publication of After the Fire way back in 1984.  She came to my 50th birthday party and managed to coax an R-rated quote out of my mother which was broadcast the next day during morning drive time.  She came to the Not Mrs. Harris party when we were celebrating a broken engagement that would have seen my daughter marrying the wrong man, and then she came to the hospital countless times when our daughter’s “right” man was losing his nine year battle with malignant melanoma.  And, when one of our first golden retrievers, suffered a stroke and was stranded on the floor of our laundry room, Patti came and sat on the floor with her to comfort her while Bill and I made some tough decisions.

So let’s just say, I owe big as far as Patti Payne is concerned, and I went to Mentoring Monday.

A hundred or so mentors were seated at an immense horse-shoe shaped table in the middle of a ball room.  We sat there with name tags on the table and with just enough space for the people who wanted to speak to us to line up in front of us.  It was not unlike one of those speed-dating scenarios where they ring a bell after five minutes’ worth of conversation.

What became painfully clear to me during my first interaction with a men-tee was that my hearing aids were not up to the task of letting me hear what she was saying in a room with several hundred enthusiastic women all talking at once.  My suggestion for next year is that they allow more space between mentors so we’ll be able to hear other people talk and also, more importantly, so we’ll be able to hear ourselves think.  I eventually picked up my chair and my line and moved to another room so I’d be able to hear.

Some of the women I spoke to were seeking advice about becoming writers.  I know a lot about the world of publishing mysteries.  I know far less about the world of publishing non-fiction, so I’m not sure how much help I was to the non-fiction writers who turned up.  Some of the young women I spoke to weren’t interested in writing at all.  What they were looking for was encouragement and permission to make changes in their lives.  These were women who had spent time in one career–most likely the one they chose after or during college–and were now seeking a work life that would give them the ability of to live their dream.

That was where I was thirty years ago.  When I first came to Seattle, I was a refugee from a bad marriage and a worse divorce.  I was also a veteran of not one but two different careers.

I graduated from college with the idea that I would teach high school English.   I did that for two years in Tucson, but it turns out teaching wasn’t what I wanted.  Then I went back to school to become a librarian and spent five years as a K-12 librarian on the Tohono O’odham reservation west of Sells.  After a move to Washington State, I tried to go back to teaching.  At the time, there were no jobs available in Pe Ell where we were living.  I did get one teaching job offer.  The principal in Vader told me he had “this particular class of third graders.”  The way he said it implied that this was a class of hellions who had mowed down their Kindergarten, first grade, and second grade teachers one after another.  I said, “No thanks,” and then went on to spend my next ten years–including the first couple of years in Seattle–selling life insurance.

At the time, selling insurance was still considered “a man’s job.”  I did it.  I made it work, and I made enough money in the process that I was able to be a single mother and support my children without the benefit of any child support.  But it wasn’t my dream job.  I didn’t love it.

By the early eighties, I was a woman in my late thirties and very much on the same page as the women who showed up on Mentoring Monday.  In an effort to better myself and my prospects, I signed up for the Dale Carnegie course–thinking it would turn me into a better life insurance salesman.  It didn’t.

The Dale Carnegie Course consists of standing up and doing public speaking presentations over the course of two months or so.  One of the assignments was to do a talk on something that had changed the course of our various lives.  On a Thursday night in March of 1982, I did a presentation on how my first husband’s chance encounter with serial killer in Tucson in 1970 had turned me into the person I had become.  When the talk was over, one of my classmates, a woman named Carol, said, “Someone should write a book about that.”

My first husband had told me early on in our marriage that there would be only “one writer in our family.”  While we were married, I did just that–I put my own writing ambitions aside.  But by early 1982, I was no longer married.  The thought that went through my mind as Carol was saying the words was, “Why not?  I’m divorced.  What have I got to lose?”  That was on a Thursday night.  After thinking about it all day Friday and Saturday, I sat down and started writing my first–never sold–book on Sunday afternoon.

It’s 32 years and 50 published books later.  Once I found my dream job and started writing, I was in it to win it!  I was no longer working at a job I didn’t love because I had found my passion.  I can tell you that passion and commitment can see you through some very dark times.  Yes, I did a few other day-job type things along the way.  How about arranging interviews for auditioners wanting to appear on Family Feud?  How about selling season tickets to patrons of the Seattle Rep?  Those were two of my least favorite interim jobs, but the rest of the time I wrote.  I wrote early and I wrote late.  Did I count the hours?  No.  Did I work more than 40 hours a week?  Absolutely.  Did I earn minimum wage?  Not even, not when my first two books sold for a total advance of $4,000–$2,000 on signing and a thousand each on delivery.  Not when I would go to a book signing, stay for two hours, sell ten original paperback books and, at a royalty rate of a quarter a book, earn $2.50 against that $4,000 advance.

But Carol’s off-hand comment, “someone should write a book about that,” changed the whole direction of my life.  Six little words.

I’m not sure I was able to light the same kind of fire under one of the women who spoke to me this past Monday, but I’m sure that fire came to life for at least some of the searching women in the room, and I’m grateful Patti Payne strong-armed me into being a part of it.