Featured Author Kiki Howell: A Journey From Marriage To Motherhood To Published Author

Being blatantly honest here, I grew up with my nose stuck in a book and what they are now calling a depressive personality.  I was determined that I would never get married, would be an English teacher/Writer, and I  always saw the glass as half empty. Well, life started laughing at me about the end of college.  During student teaching, I met my husband and became a believer in Love At First Sight! Of course, in true English Teacher fashion, of which we both were, we wrote letters for almost 11 months before even going out on our first date.

From there, life became a whirlwind.  October 1994 – First Date, February 1995 – Engagement, August – Wedding, March – Pregnant and on Bed Rest, November – Eight Pound Preemie. Quite a year!  Two years later I ended my second high-risk pregnancy with another eight pound Preemie, and thus begun my battles with diabetes and severe depression among other things. My road to healing was long, and varied.  Yet, during that time I was blessed to stay home with my sons.

On our ten year anniversary, my husband and I read those letters we sent each other after college. I had written a lot about my writing in them and realized I had not written in over a decade. My husband encouraged me to get back into it. Then, he went on a trip to Israel.  One phone call with an explosion in the distance, and I did not sleep well for the next two weeks he was there.  At the time, my husband had given me a book of writing exercises to spark creativity, and one of the exercises was to write in a genre you were not comfortable with. I had been poking around on the internet looking at different publishing houses. Ellora’s Cave publishing offices were a town away from where I landed after college, so I also read my first erotic romance.  Also in my searches, I read a call for an erotic short story series called Celtic Love Knots with Whiskey Creek Press Torrid. Wicca had always fascinated me, so I started to research it. Long story getting shorter, I promise, the two stories I wrote for that series both got contracted. Commence second whirlwind in my life.  That was November 2007.

Now, my days are getting my kids off to school, writing, after-school activities, dinner, whatever small amount of housework I can get away with, and then sitting with my laptop in the living room at night when the kids are calming down before bed to do promotional stuff. There are the occasional nights where I am completely absorbed with a story and stay up most of the night writing.  Of course, at the moment, it is summer break.  But, my husband is still a teacher, so he is off as well.   I can write and promote, just not on any kind of schedule.

My stories come to me in different ways. For example, sometimes research of something I have read inspires the plot, like with The Healing Spell.  Sometimes I come up with plot after hear about a situation that bothers me, and I find it cathartic to write a story with a similar situation but a happy ending. I did that with my novella, Rituals. Other times my writing is just an escape, pure fun, where I can let my imagination run wild. Like with The Witch’s Beast, a Torrid Twisted Fairy Tale which retells the Beauty and the Beast entirely from the witch’s point of view. It was written more to settle a score with the Grimm Brothers because even as a kid, I did not think it fair that the witch that started it all only got one line in the tale.  Sorry, a tangent that could not be stopped.

Even now, when depression mostly losses to my new—learned through various self-help books—positive outlook on life, I am still oversensitive to others emotions.  I still struggle with the realities of life and watching the effects they have on my children.  But, I have an outlet, a healthy escape.  I truly believe with all my heart that everyone needs one.  I may have already known mine, but I lost it for a time, and had to re-discover it.  Whether buried or hidden, you have one too.

I have written over twenty different stories of various lengths about vampires, demons, witches, ghosts and shape shifters.  They appear in anthologies, ebooks and trade paperbacks.  

So, I believe that if I can, anyone can obtain their dreams. During my depression, I read a lot of self-help books, studied quantum physics and even became a certified Feng Shui practitioner.  In all of my desperate searching, I found that I held the power to obtain the happiness and the success that I wanted. I am a big fan of Wayne W Dyer, and would recommend his books to anyone struggling with anything, life, stress, disease…

In The Sorcerer’s Songs, the song I used, “Hello Old Friend,” was originally written for me after I started coming out of my severe depression.  It is a song which touches many chords within my heart.  But, another song on my husband’s CD, but not in the book, that is wonderful and heart-wrenching and deeply personal is called “One Job.”  I share them now because I think with the two my husband has captured one of my biggest journeys, and that was back to happiness, back to me, so that I could become all I wanted as a wife, a mother, a writer.

“A destiny unfulfilled is an affront against the universe.” 

~Anonymous Greek Philosopher

 

                                                    To Learn More About Kiki, please visit: 

http://www.kikihowell.com/