Before I get into my post, I would like to say how proud I am of my older son. Today as part of his student council duties is collecting canned goods for the student council food drive to help our local soup kitchen. The fourth grade seems to be winning their competition for what he called “the best prize of all: the warm fuzzy feeling of helping people in need”. I don’t know what I did, but I must’ve done something right. That boy will change the world I think.

Now that we got the “pride” part of our title out of the way, I enter into the “trepidation”. As my last post pointed out, I was terrified at the idea of publishing my chapter-ed short story. I always tell my son, “sometimes no matter how afraid you are, you need to suck it up and dive head first”. That post made me realize that I said a typical parental hypocritical statement. How could I tell him “you can be anything in the world you want to be if you want it enough” and “just hold your worries and do it” if I wasn’t going to do the same. As parents it’s our job to show our children that you need to always aim higher to accomplish goals, no matter how impossible it seems. Teaching your child to settle for what they have in life, to me, teaches them that they don’t need to dream and that settling for mediocrity is ok. (I know I’ve said this point a dozen times, but it needs to be emphasized.) It’s never ok to settle.

I took this to heart, and took and deep breath and uploaded my story to Kindle epublishing. Yes, I am officially published. So you can own this piece of art for only $0.99 on the Kindle. Don’t have a Kindle? Get a nice Kindle app on your phone, iPad, other tablet, etc. The title you ask? “Teagan” by Brianne LaRochelle.

I’m terrified. I’m afraid that I failed at that the story is crap and people will insult me and I’ll decide to give up instead of getting better. But if I didn’t just suck it up and do it, I’ll never know if people actually will enjoy it. I’d never know if following my dreams of writing would pay off. Most importantly though, I’d never be able to tell my sons that “mommy was scared, and she did it anyways.” Our actions, as unimportant as they seem, will always affect our children because they look up to us to show them everything.