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’re now calling a depressive personality.  I was determined that I’d 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 my second high-risk pregnancy ended with another eight pound Preemie, and thus begun my battles with diabetes and severe depression among other things. My road to healing, which still continues today, was long and varied.  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’m a big fan of Wayne W Dyer, and would recommend his books to anyone struggling with anything, life, stress, disease”¦Yet, during that time I was also blessed to  be a stay-at-home mother.

On our ten year anniversary, my husband and I read those letters we’d sent each other after college. I’d written a lot about my writing in them and realized I h’d not written in over a decade. My husband encouraged me to get back into it. Then, he went on a two week trip to Israel.  One phone call with an explosion in the distance, and I didn’t 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 weren’t comfortable with. I’d 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 at the time just read my first erotic romance.  In my poking around the Internet looking at the publishing industry, 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’m completely absorbed with a story and stay up most of the night writing.  Of course, life doesn’t like to play be schedules either, so I am learning to roll with the punches these days.

My stories come to me in different ways. For example, sometimes in research, something I’ve read, inspires the plot, like with my story The Healing Spell.  Other times I come up with plot after hearing 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. Of course then there are the times when 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 didn’t think it fair that the witch who started the whole tale only got one line in the tale.  Sorry, a tangent that could not be stopped. Recently, I’ve written a few stories where I’ve challenged myself to stay in reality, to write more pagan tales, like Working Out The Kinks which releases in Oct with Rebel Ink Press, a story of reconciliation and sex magick. These are a lot of fun.

Even now, when depression mostly losses to my new””learned through various self-help books””positive outlook on life, I’m still oversensitive to others emotions.  I still struggle with the realities of life and watching the effects they have on my children, for a big example.  But, I have an outlet, a healthy escape.  I truly believe, with all my heart ,that everyone needs one.  I may’ve 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’ve now written over thirty 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. For me, a big part of that journeys back to happiness, back to me, was pursuing my dream of being an author, and I believe that makes me a better person, a better wife, and a better mother. I pray if nothing else, I’ve taught my sons that any dream can be obtained if you work for it.

“A destiny unfulfilled is an affront against the universe.”
~Anonymous Greek Philosopher

Kiki Howell

~where love is a mystical thing~

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