I’m happy to say that my reading at Lady Jane’s Salon in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton went off without a hitch! The women running the program were kind and welcoming, and immediately put me at ease. The audience was wonderful, and the other authors were entertaining and entirely fabulous.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that during the days leading up to the reading. Since it was my first one, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was nervous. I kept changing my mind about which scene to read from “Gambling on a Scoundrel,” and I was convinced that I would stutter and stumble on stage.

Did you ever try to choose a great scene to read aloud from a romance novel, only to realize that the wonderful “first kiss” scene you’d selected made you blush when you imagined reading it in front of your kids? No? All I can say is that the flush of embarrassment I felt wasn’t pleasant. Not pleasant at all.

I had finally chosen the perfect scene, printed it out in large font, and was practicing it when my seventeen year-old son came in to say goodnight. He could see I was nervous and decided to offer advice.

“Mom,” he said, “I’m a fan of (band name I can’t remember), and their first two albums were similar, but the third one was quite different. You see, the guy who wrote the lyrics went through a hard time, and while working through things, he decided to write what he was feeling. He put it on paper, made it rhyme, turned it into music, and used it for the album. When it came time to perform his songs, he was much more embarrassed than he had been with his previous albums. But he said he realized that he was embarrassed because he was revealing things he’d kept private… pieces of himself, and that although he was proud of what he’d created, it was hard to bare himself that way. But sometimes the cost of good art is a bit of embarrassment when it comes time to share it with the world.”

When did my son get so wise? When did he learn exactly the right thing to say?