My Journey

Posted on May 01, 2012

After working in corporate America for twenty years, I decided to take a leap of faith and leave my family’s business, choosing a path that I’d hoped would lead to happiness and personal fulfillment. In pursuit of my dreams, my direction was always crystal clear to me even though the destination remained a mystery… until now. This requires a special kind of faith and determination — the kind that requires you to believe with all your heart and soul that you’re doing the right thing, and that you can achieve anything you set your mind to, so long as you give it your all and don’t give up. When obstacles get in the way — and they always will — you find a way to overcome them, one way or another. And if your path should turn out not to be the right one, then that’s okay, because you know that every path always leads to yet another. And it’s at this juncture where I find myself standing now, an author having written and published my first novel, Sand Dollar: A Story of Undying Love. Although I can’t see what lies ahead on this journey, I know one thing for sure: when I look behind, I see the things that I’ve accomplished, and I smile with pride.

It didn’t matter to me that I had no training, education, or experience in writing fiction. Instead, I focused on my strengths: I’m fairly intelligent and creative, I’m in touch with my innermost feelings and emotions (a requirement in order to write from the heart), I’m a quick learner, and I’ve got drive and determination. But perhaps the biggest strength of all, the one that gave me the most amount of confidence, was the conviction that I was armed with an amazing story inside my head, one that just had to be born. In fact, I believed that Sand Dollar could have as much potential as The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. And so, for two years I wrote and rewrote; and when I was done writing, I rewrote some more. I knew that it would be a learning process that I’d hoped to pick up along the way, which seemed to work well for me considering my strengths.

However, I found out the hard way that it’s almost impossible for first-time authors with no track record to get traditionally published. Rejection was at every turn. To think you could make it all the way to the end zone only to get stopped at the goal line would be very disheartening to just about anyone. So I just didn’t think that way. Instead, I refused to allow obstacles to prevent me from achieving the goal that I had set for myself. And now that I’ve published my first novel — achieving my goal — perhaps the biggest obstacle lies ahead — marketing it.

So if you enjoyed reading Sand Dollar, please send me an email and let me know what you think. You could even help out by spreading the word or posting a review online at Amazon. With a little luck and a lot more hard work, Sand Dollar could become a success, and who knows, maybe even the next great love story of our time… And I’ll continue to write more stories, the kind you love to fall in love with.

Sebastian Cole  🙂