Hi, I'm Daphnie...

  I was a writer who didn't write.

I had no passion for my passion. 

But, if my father, who was a writer, named me after his favorite writer, Daphne du Maurier… doesn’t that make me a writer?

Okay… what if I have two bunnies named Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Does that kinda make me a writer?

Who the fuck knows.

I'm 63 years old and retired. I live in Naples, FL. I have five grown babies, fifteen grandsugars, and I help care for my mother who has dementia. I have a maniac dog named Mae, the aforementioned bunnies, and two horses who pretty much run the entire shitshow. 

For years I worked in Florida politics, campaign consulting, lobbying, local governments, the entire circus. 

It taught me everything about power, persuasion, and the particular madness of Florida politics. 

It also taught me how much of myself I had to leave at the door to do it. 

A few years ago, I started digging into why I had no passion for my passion.  Apparently, my crazy has a lot of layers. A lot of inner children, old stories, and parts of me I didn't know existed. That work, and then the death of my best friend… my 13-year-old American Bulldog named Maggie, 

cracked my closed heart wide open. 

The me you’re meeting here now has no choice but to listen to that once shut-out passion that's screaming for a martini...

and for me to finally write the story that's been in my head for fifteen years. 

Maybe a novel about four politically powerful friends who — asked by a dying father, "If you died today, would you die happy?" — risk their careers to honor his final wish while quietly facing the death of every performance they've called life.

Yea, maybe a story about that. 😎

Oh… and until recently… I had a husband. 

But that’s a complicated story for another blog post… one that'll have 432,034 segments.

And a martini Zoom call.

With chocolate.

Here I am writing the next chapter of my life as I write the next chapters of my novel.

I'm completely starting over. 

Did I mention I'm sixty-freakin-three?

This blog is where I think out loud. 

Where I tell the truth about the continual fight with my inner voices about whether I'm good enough, 

whether my writing is good enough, whether I should keep going.

 So, it's just me now (well… just me and my giant chaotic family and my zoo and those damn inner voices).

Beauties — welcome. 

Pour yourself a martini. Stay awhile.

And thank you for being here.