My favorite picture of my mother was, coincidentally, taken by Doug Jones of the Portland Press Herald in 2002, the same year her first novel “In The Bleak Midwinter” was published. She’s sitting at the clunky white late-’90s computer that weighed half a metric ton and my 2-year-old sister is on her lap. Mom is helping her put on a shoe. There’s an abandoned mug of tea in the foreground. It’s got all the elements I think of when I think of my mother: maternal instinct, massive amounts of writing talent, clutter. (There’s also a pile of books on a table in the background that hasn’t been moved since 2002.)

That slow and noisy computer that occasionally ate up the phone line with its dial-up screams is where she wrote her first books, and it’s where she found out she would be a published author. I was nine or 10 when that happened but I remember it well. She had entered a contest that St. Martin’s Press had put on for a debut mystery novel manuscript. The prize was you got your book published. Mom and I got home that day and, as we used to do, went and checked our answering machine first thing. One of the messages was from an editor at the contest, telling her to check her email. Mom said something along the lines of “maybe they wanted to tell me good job, try again next year.”

Everyone remembers what I said next, which was the brutally honest, “Mom, they don’t call losers.” She checked her email, which I assume took awhile given that the internet was rural dial-up, and when she found out she’d won she jumped up and down and screamed and cried. When Dad got home she told him and the first thing he thought — being a former lawyer — was “for God’s sake, Jule, don’t send them any money!” I obviously inherited my ability to stick my foot in my mouth from him.

Anyway, despite Dad’s worry, it wasn’t a scam. The book was published, it won a whole shelf of awards (we keep them on the living room bookcase) and my mom became not just my mother, but Julia Spencer-Fleming, Successful Author.

I didn’t just inherit raw writing talent from Mom, although that’s definitely where it came from. I learned how to be a public-facing writer from her. If you’ve ever interacted with me and found that I was pleasant to talk to, or even just roughly normal, that’s because I learned how to from watching my mom do it, over decades of having someone slowly walk up to us and go “Hey, aren’t you …?”

People have been asking me for years if I want to be a full-time writer, “like your mom.” Usually I say no and cite the lack of health insurance. But that’s only part of it. I don’t want the competition. My mom can absolutely smoke me in a writing match. I can’t do dark, emotional murder mysteries, but she can absolutely write short, sweet, humorous-but-heartwarming pieces. I know because I see her do it when it’s her week to take the lead on producing content for the blog she shares with six other female mystery authors. (Because focusing on her own success is simply not enough for Mom, she’s part of “The Avengers” but if all the superheroes were middle-aged authors).

And writing is a hard business. Even with the lucky break of getting her first book published via a contest, which eliminated the pavement-pounding of submitting a manuscript to tons of different agents and publishers, being a New York Times Best-selling Author didn’t happen overnight. I spent many days on the road between book events and many nights in the back of a library or bookstore, doing my homework while Mom gave a talk or reading. I think we’ve been to every library and bookstore between here and Buffalo. (And if you’re aware of a place she hasn’t visited – let me know! She’ll probably go.)

For the first few books she wrote, her publishing company only gave her a small marketing budget. So my dad, who was bound and determined to see his wife be successful, turned himself into a one-man-two-child publicity team. I spent a lot of time after school assembling mass mailings, creating email databases in Excel, and cold-calling book stores to get the name of their hiring manager. And since I don’t have any children of my own yet to help with that sort of work, I don’t know how I could possibly build my career to mom’s heights.

I would not be The Maine Millennial without my mom. So if you like my columns, you have her to thank. And if you don’t like my columns, unfortunately, you still have her to thank for that. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

Victoria Hugo-Vidal is a Maine millennial. She can be contacted at:
themainemillennial@gmail.com
Twitter: @mainemillennial