Let´s get it started!

I recently started this blog to encourage people to get to know a little bit about me. I´m a 35 year-old mother  that decided to quit her job for the whole "chasing the dream" idea.

I used to work a part time job, approving loans and filling paperwork for a bank, but 3 months ago I decided I was finally giving my true passion, writing, a shot. I quit! ...scary!

I´ve started writing a novel by the age of 25 but never finished it, a few years later I showed my the unfinished story to my older sister, Paula, she liked it so much that she kept calling me to send her more pages, she wanted to know what will happen next and finally, almost five years after I started writing that story I decided I had to finish it, or my sister would finish me! I did! I liked it as well. I gave it for a few people to read it too, they all liked it and even though I had no background in literature or in anything else, for that matter,(I dropped out of school after getting pregnant at my sophomore year in college) I decided to try and get it published.

Me and my daughter, Eduarda. 

As you may have already figured out by now I failed, miserably, I got turned down by every Brazillian publishing house I sent my mauscript to. I got depressed, despondent even, I had this crazy felling it would work perfectly you know, I had this voice whispering in my ear saying; That´s what you were supposed to be doing all you life. You are a writer! That´s what you were born to be!...but...no, not this time. You may be wondering why trust that voice in the first place, you may even be laughing at me and saying that only numbers are to be trusted, voices inside your head are probably just  a sign that you´re losing it, but I don´t see it that way.

I believe that voice, it had always been right before. When I was about 13 years-old I met a man 11 years older than me, we became friends (please don´t ask me how, but that´s what happened) a few years later, he was at my house and he said he was leaving, for he had to be somewhere by 8. I asked him if he was going on a date and he confirmed it, and even though I was already in love with that man by then it did not hurt me, because the voice said I would be the one marrying him one day.

I told him that much, he laughed. We got married before my 21th birthday and we´re still happily married.

We´re still going strong!

So yes, I believe the voice even when it sounds a little coocoo, so the fact that it had failed me, having to admit it was wrong, crushed me. I shoved my mauscript into a drawer and forgot about it for many years.

About two years ago, I´m not sure out of where, an idea came to me, what if I tried to sell my novel abroad, it seemed to me like my chances would increase in a wider market, Brazil´s publishing market still is very small. Yes, once  again it was a crazy idea but it wouldn´t leave me alone, I tried to shut the voice up so many times I lost count of it and still, it kept repeating the same thing like a mantra. Give it a try!

I looked for a professional translator to translate my mauscript into English, I decided to relocate my characters and aside from geography it was indeed an American story from the start, once there´s not many serial-killers in Brazil. The thing is, a translator proved to be way beyond what I was willing to invest in this project, money was an issue, but as I didn´t work the whole day through, time wasn´t.  I decided to tackle the task myself, even though I had never really learned English.

My father was an English teacher (he´s retired now) but still he never taught any of his kids the language (there´s four of us) he didn´t believe in the method of teaching English (go figure!) he believed in naturally acquiring the language, as a baby would, but up to the age of thrirteen I still hadn´t. How could I, living in Brazil?

Well, fate must have something to do with what happened then, in my teen years, otherwise, Two, wouldn´t exist. An american teacher came to live in Brazil for 6 months with his 5 kids, all around my age and had no place to stay at that point, my father had a little country house that he offered the teacher, he took it.

Here´s a picture of the teacher´s family today

My father used to go out with the teacher a lot, to show him the city or whatever, leaving us kids to stay with his kids. Oh well, they didn´t speak a word of Portuguese and we could not go much further than Hello, how do you do in English. It was hard at first but my father´s theory proved to be spot on! Three months later I was speaking English fluently, so that many years later, by the age of 33 I could give my luck a chance and translate the manuscript myself.

I wasn´t easy, breezy, no sir, it was a long, exhausting process, it took me almost a year to translate the little over 400 pages but I finally saw the end of it. My father agreed to review my work afterwards (thank God!) and he finished it by December of 2012.

While he was still reviewing it, my brother started following a blogger called James Altucher, the guy gave all kind of advices on how to self-publish (being himself an author) and my brother, knowing I had no idea how to put my work out in the foreing market, started sending me these links. By the time my father finished the reviewing process I learned about CreateSpace and a few weeks later, my book was finally published!

That´s the story of how my first book, Two, came to life.

 The voice wasn´t wrong after all, even if I don´t sell more than 10 copies it wasn´t wrong at all. I´m doing what I love and I´m looking at a copy of my book as I write this post and if I can see a book with my name and picture at the cover, it means I´m a writer...unless the voice had evolved to hallucinations!