When I was about ten years old I read Little Women and all I wanted in the world was to be Jo March. I wanted to have a writing garret where I could disappear and write and where my novel would be sent ceremoniously out into the world where a kindly publisher would be dazzled and immediately accept it. (Of course I did not know that Louisa May Alcott had been writing for some time and submitted Little Women under the direction of an editor looking for girls' stories but whatever.)

When I was sixteen and a senior in high school, I badgered an English teacher I had never met who was assigned the school's literary magazine. I kept at him daily until he agreed to take me on as editor and then I put together a staff of artists and writers that filled the biggest issue we had ever done. It was my crowning achievement even though we didn't win any awards. I still have a couple of copies down in my office.

In college (the first time) I wandered in and out of classes on aviation and business management with magazines hidden behind my textbooks and notes that were as filled with poetry as planning and design. (This might explain why I had to take Aircraft Performance twice.) I signed up for every literary elective I could find at my predominantly engineering university which was not easy. I also joined the newspaper staff and wrote essays and articles for every issue.

At my first job, in airport management in Palm Beach County, I hated every single moment I was working. The only good thing was the paycheck and the free library card to all the libraries in the county. I set up my computer in my tiny apartment and started a novel about fairies and a prince. It made me happy to write every night while I sat with my dog beside me and wondered where in the world I was going to go to get my life on track.

In Alaska I went back to school (second and third times) to find a reason to read and write. Everybody was absorbed by flying at the Company but I was never going to be a commercial pilot. I sat at my desk after the flights were launched and worked on papers about the Civil War and the Korean War and Lawrence of Arabia. In graduate school I worked all the time, through my grandmother's sudden death and my father's illness and his brutal death and my husband's illness (those were 12 very very very bad months) on my thesis. It was the longest thing I had ever written (150 pages). When I graduated it was bound by the university and placed on the shelf in the library.

For years I would go to the online catalog and look it up, to see if anyone checked it out.

And then there were articles written based on the thesis (for which I was paid an astounding amount of money compared to the work involved) and the first stories that became the first book that led to the agent who requested the second book and now here I am. Two books written (one fiction and one non) on working for the Company in Alaska. Now here I am more than 30 years after Jo March and tomorrow I have a party to go to and I wonder what I will say.

At some point, during this very informal party with couples and children and the turkey fryers going outside, someone I do not know will ask me what it is that I do. And I will look across the room and see my husband, who is only a few years older than me but has achieved or surpassed every single goal he has set in his life. And he will be surrounded by guys who will be talking about flying and asking him about Alaska flying and his flight time (they always ask this and he has very high career flight time even though he no longer flies commercially). They will ask him about the aircraft leasing company and the aircraft he buys and the contracts he writes and the deals he puts together. They will marvel that he is so young and works only for himself. They will ask him how he does it.

They always ask him.

And I will hear that question from someone next to me, from someone asking "What do you do?" and I will think the answer that is easy is the one that is also true. That I edit the contracts, that I proofread all he writes, that I keep all the company books and deal with the accountant and the banker and make the deposits and write the checks and handle the IRS and all those governmental forms. This company is 50% mine officially and I can say all of that. I can say "We own an aircraft leasing company." I can say that and my husband would agree. He wouldn't argue. He knows all that I do.

But we both know anyone could do my part of this company while only he can do his.

And really, it has only and ever been me helping with the nuts and bolts part of his dream while my visions of Jo March have brought me here to this moment in my life and another book started that no one has asked for on a subject that possibly no one will concern themselves with and a narrative that might never be read by anyone other than me.

Because of tomorrow's party, I am thinking about a party in fifteen years, or twenty. I think about people asking about grandchildren (really?) and about retirement programs and about aches and pains perhaps. And someone asking me, again, "What do you do?". And across the room will still be my husband, and now there will be many more planes and many more deals and many more slaps on the back and heads shaking and, from a few of those around him, jealousy masked in friendly banter. And by then will I have five more books on a hard drive or ten? Will I still be saying that publishing is tough, that extreme patience is warranted, that sometimes it is very very unfair, and really, anyway, I write only for myself?

Or maybe I will answer like I do tomorrow, that we have an aircraft leasing company and a child and so many hobbies. And I keep busy with all of that. We are so happy and so successful and I keep so very busy. I'm so busy I hardly remember Jo March at all.

And that would be a lie, really, but it's an easy one to make. Because it is not as if I do not have a supportive husband or all the time in the world to write. It is just that I have taken this as far as I can on my own and now I am dependent upon the whims and desires of others. And now there really may be nothing more than what I have at this moment. There really may never be anything more to say other than, "I write in my spare time". At parties though, they don't understand the publishing business or the what it means to be a writer or just that sometimes being good is not enough.

They just shake their heads when you say you are a writer and they laugh a little bit inside. And they look down on you as foolish or flighty or deluded. That doesn't happen though when you say you own airplanes; in fact when you say that they don't have any damn thing to say back at all.

And sometimes that's what you want at parties.