I've been writing Shifting Loyalties for about four months now. I'm 41 chapters in with 98,341 words written.

Today, I didn't have time to write because I needed to take my eldest to the dentist. She's 21 and can technically take herself, but when you have three children with narcolepsy and POTS, sometimes it doesn't matter how old they get. Being a mom comes first.

So, I took a printed copy of my draft in progress, hole-punched it, and tossed it into a binder.

While she got her teeth cleaned, my manuscript got a good cleaning.

How many times can a character shrug? Apparently, far too many.

It was time well spent, though. I managed to read through four chapters with a red pen in hand.

And trust me... there was a lot of red ink on those pages.

Reading my manuscript this way reminded me how grateful I am for the time I spent in graduate school at USF. Being part of Papercut and Sigma Tau Delta taught me more than I can express. Add in countless roundtable critiques and workshop reviews, and I received an education that went far beyond lesson planning and classroom management.

My degrees were meant to prepare me to become an English teacher.

And they absolutely did.

What I didn't fully appreciate back then was how much they were also preparing me to write—and edit—my own novels.