How do you slow down a speeding train?

I don’t know, but I think I’m about to learn! For the past twenty-three years, I’ve lived with a project that was, more or less, like one of my children. Every artist, writer or composer who sweats blood and tears over a painting, a book or a composition eventually feels like this labor of love is an offspring. A child. Their child.
Sister of Silence has been just such a child, for all of these long years. It’s been shoved to the back of a drawer, relegated to the bottom of a box or buried beneath a mountain of books and journals, and yet, somehow, I was never able to let it go. Just drop it. Forget about it, and walk away.
I had something to say, yes, that was certainly part of it. I had a story to tell—another reason I would, from time to time, dig out the most current revision and began afresh. But it was more than that: it was something bigger than me, with a life of its own, and I didn’t feel I had the right to not make it available for other people.
Because, the truth is, Sister of Silence is a book about shattering silence, about helping women and children, and parents and families. It’s about education and sterilization and every topic you could imagine, but which you might not bring up during “polite” conversation.
They say people who become paralyzed and do nothing to act, when action needs to happen, do so from fear. One thing many people are afraid of is success. I am one of those people. As a journalist, I love telling other people’s stories. I’ve been doing that since high school. That love, that singular occupation that no blogger could ever understand, had he not worked his way up the ranks at a newspaper office, is something that allowed me to stand in the background. I was content there.
I don’t like being in the limelight—I never have. But Sister of Silence has forced me to stand here, and lately I’ve learned that this might be something I have to do on a regular basis. I do so only because I know I’ve got something to say that people need, that they want to hear. I know this because after finally setting my book to free, to succeed or fail on its own, I’m receiving deeply-moving, personal responses from the readers who’ve gotten to read Sister of Silence.
With those responses have come other . . . invitations and opportunities. None which I can mention now—but which I will, as soon as I can. That’s why I know this train is not going to slow down anytime soon. I just hope I can keep up!