From the depths of hell is when my writing a novel came about. I sat down at my computer and began to write to relieve my pain of discontent. I knew I wasn’t happy. I knew I couldn’t do anything about it because I was married to a man who suffered anxiety and couldn’t be left alone for more than an hour without someone with him. I felt helpless, so one day I sat down at the computer and let my fingers fly across the computer keyboard. I seemed to be in a trance and by the time I snapped out of it and looked down, I saw that  I had written 10 pages. I was amazed. I was excited. I didn’t worry about spelling or grammar, no, I just typed words from somewhere deep within myself. It must have been pent up for some time because it flowed out like honey on a piece of bread.

That book was Time Heals, Forgiveness Mends. It was about a woman who was struggling with her life, sort of living in a box, and didn’t know it until her husband was brutally murdered in a hotel room. She helped the very people who were accused of her husband’s murder and her husband’s colleagues thought she had gone off  the deep end, but she continued to help them and discovered herself once again. The story had similarities of my life at the time, but I blended some of it with a lifetime friend’s life as well and with the two put together, Time Heals, Forgiveness Mends was written and published. I was overjoyed. I felt a part of myself coming alive again.

More than a year later, my husband asked for a divorce and left. That is when I found myself in familiar depths of pain, and so severe that I wrote Sometimes your Greatest Misery can be your Greatest Happiness. It was an odd pain; my mind was relieved and contented, but my body went into shock and I couldn’t eat or sleep for almost three days. After I started with a tablespoon of soup every two hours to regain my strength back, and a day later, my lifetime friend and her husband took me out to dinner, my body snapped back and later that night I sat down at the computer and wrote Sometimes your Greatest Misery can be your Greatest Happiness. It is a self-help book about how to deal with pain in your life and how your thoughts can change your life. I am a therapist so writing the book came natural for me, but the meat of the self-help book came from my own experience of such a painful rude awakening.

Four years later, I met my present husband online. We began writing back and forth and when he found out I was a writer, he offered to proof my books for me because he had a master’s in English. I wrote back a paragraph of a fantasy story and said, “Tag, your it.” He wrote back and added another paragraph to the story and on and on we wrote for four months on that story, and when it came to its end, we met in person. We publish that story with our emails we had written and called it, Dancing with our Love.

In 2013, my husband, Peter, and I opened PnPAuthors where we promote other authors. We believe authors helping one another is what is best for all authors.

Books by Pattimari Sheets Cacciolfi

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