Have you ever read a book and even before you finish you’re thinking you could have done it better?  That’s the collective thought we shared one Sunday afternoon back in 1997 at our regular book club meeting.  We were reviewing the latest by one of our favorite female writers and were quite simply disappointed.  Our assumption was she must have had a publisher deadline and just threw something on the paper.

We put on our most professional sounding voices and criticized her character development, the plot lines and the abrupt ending.  After all, we’d been reading and discussing together for about 8 years!

This was the genesis of our own book.  The conversation went something like . . .. “I could have done better than that.”  “Well why don’t we write one ourselves?”  At the time there were 16 of us sitting around an apartment living room in North Seattle.

Our informal leader, Edna, (a most avid reader, poet, free-lance editor and greeting card designer) was determined and didn’t let the topic die.  For the next few meetings she poked and prodded us to brain storm and organize in order to write a book.

We floated several ideas around and finally agreed we’d each write our own short story and put them together as a collection.  It sounded so easy during that first conversation.  It took over a year for each of us to complete our stories.

Along the way we agreed on a title that summarized the feel of the collection.  The stories touched on many facets of life and each of them was very personal and mattered to us.   We quickly settled on “Life Matters”.