CALIFORNIA, CENTRAL COAST: December, 2009 (Part 2)

And Susan laid out her idea that I should start a blog about the Shakespeare Club in order to build an audience. She said, I think we submitted the book to publishers too soon and in the wrong climate. This story is not a Bush-era book; it's more an Obama-era book.

I blinked and blinked again. We were into year two of not selling this story and yet she wasn't dumping me? I listened to Susan, full of optimism, chat about publishing reinventing itself and people continuing to read in even greater numbers and where my book would fit into the bigger scheme.

Outside the restaurant, crowds bustled up and down Ninth Avenue. The sun shone on this day in June. Taxis honked and look, a dancer off to class and maybe a singer off to rehearsal and soon I would be off to start a blog.

William helped me set it up. I chose Elizabethan wallpaper for the site and started to write. I selected accompanying pictures and William took case of editing and layout. We went to yoga classes together. For a couple with few surface interests in common, we leaned on each other like two sheets of plywood forming a roof.

I knew enough about the realities of a career in writing to know there isn't much money in having a book published. There could be, down the line, if it was a success and if you have an agent who has a passion for ancillary rights, but simply writing a book and having the luck to get it published ain't going to make you rich.

I never became an actor to get rich, and I succeeded. I was on a similar path with my writing career. I wrote because I had to, as I had acted, because there was little choice. The craving to communicate simply exists and the need is for audience.

From the first week that my blog was published I had audience. One, two, three and then a thousand hits. I'd been writing screenplays and television scripts for years with no audience and then writing books with no audience and now, out there in the universe, strangers were reading the stories of my willing little kids into the world of William Shakespeare.

That summer I also noticed something:

When I wrote, the prickly itchy heat on my neck stopped.