Rewrite Your Life. Jessica Lourey

and family do not all share my opinions) and am fine with the “I don't knows.” Willful ignorance, though? Makes me rage.

      My sense of humor is not always kosher. I sometimes think weird things are funny. Weird, horrible things like that Internet photo of two action figure GI Joes perched on the corpse of a roadkill squirrel as if they've just hunted it on safari.

      Some days, I'm crabby, uninspired, and scared. Scared that people will hate my writing, worried that people will see right through me and turn away, afraid that whatever spark it is that keeps me wanting to tell stories and write books will disappear and I'll feel lost. This means that I'm not always funny or interesting. My funny is a dial-up superpower rather than a Wi-Fi one.

      I am not religious, but I am spiritual. I'm pretty far from having this one figured out, but what it means in practice is that I will treat other people as I would like to be treated, and I might sometimes talk about meditating or gratitude or positive visualization and looking for (and seeing) magic on a regular basis—my daughter's gorgeous smile, the light shining through lemon-colored fall leaves, my son choosing being kind over being right, dreaming about someone from high school one night and seeing the person for the first time in ten years the next day, that sort of thing.

      My biggest fear is letting all the “real me” listed above out into the world and being resoundingly rejected. How to use it in service of my writing? I channel my inappropriate humor and love of swearing into Mrs. Berns, the oversexed octogenarian who is my favorite character in my first mystery series. The fear of being vilified for my far-left politics and of letting people down for not always being “on” manifests as the protagonist's fish-out-of-water, city-girl-in-a-small town conflict that runs throughout those same books. Once I claimed my spirituality and my belief in what I call kitchen magic, I realized I wanted more of it in my life and wrote the magical realism book whose self-publishing I funded through my Kickstarter campaign. I sense there is more to excavate there, so I plan to expand that book into a series.