In 1995, I took a job as a freelance writer to help pay the bills. In 1999, I took a steady job as a writer and editor to help pay the bills. In 2002, I wrote a book on Sears Homes and worked hard to promote and sell that book. Within two weeks of that book’s publication, my marriage ended and I really needed to sell some books to help pay the bills.

From 2002 to 2010, I wrote and published another five books and wrote dozens of articles, too. You see, I really needed to make some money to help pay the bills.

Today, after much effort and consternation and fingernail nibbling, I finished writing my 7th book, tentatively titled, “The Sears Homes of Illinois.” I’m very pleased with the end result and hope and pray that my editor will be similarly pleased. Hopefully, he’ll never find out my dirty little secret.

I’m not a real writer.

I have an image that writing comes easy to real writers. When you’re a real writer, words flow effortlessly from your literary mind to your clean, pretty paper. None of this agonizing over each and every word. None of this reaching for the thesaurus because you can not recall THE perfect word that will work in that empty space in that already goofy-sounding sentence.

I write books about old houses, and I find that type of writing excruciatingly difficult. I can’t imagine trying to write a fictional account of something. I take historical facts and real-life experience and distill it down to a few thousand words. That sounds so simple and easy. But it’s not. For me.

And yet today, as I wrote the final chapter of The Sears Homes of Illinois, I had one of those delightful moments of inspiration and the words flowed and the words worked and I ended up writing five paragraphs in five hours and those five paragraphs represented some of the best writing I have ever done. When my husband came home, I made him sit down and pay attention while I read him those five paragraphs. He agreed that it was some of my best writing.

I love what Elizabeth Gilbert (a real writer) said about the creative process:  “If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to be glimpsed for just one moment, then ole. If not, dance anyhow. Have the sheer determination and stubbornness to keep showing up do your part anyhow.”

In my 15-year career as a writer, creating articles and books has always felt like an enormous and laborious effort, but Ms. Gilbert is right. Having the “sheer determination and stubbornness to keep showing up” represents at least 85% of the battle.

On Wednesday, February 17th, I left for Illinois. Today, Wednesday (March 1oth) I returned home. I spent most of these three weeks, traveling throughout the state of Illinois, from Chicago to Cairo to Champaign, photographing and documenting the Sears Homes among us. To read more about Sears Homes, click here.

In a few months, I’ll be finishing up this new book titled, The Sears Homes of Illinois.

Traipsing around Illinois was a lot of fun, but also a lot of intense effort. I started each day around 5:00 am, and mapped out a detailed plan of where I’d travel and what I’d do. Then I’d hit the road between 6:00 am and 8:00 am and stay gone until 4:00 pm or beyond. In my three weeks in Illinois, I put 2,500 miles on my little rental car. That doesn’t include my travels around Chicago, where Rebecca Hunter was kind enough to drive me around.

When I’d enter a city, I’d take a look at my Garmin and find the railroad tracks and find the cementery and find the streets marked “McKinley” and “Elm” and “Pershing” and “Third Street.” You can usually find Sears Homes on streets thus named. And then I’d drive through these areas, looking for Sears Homes. When I found a Sears Home, I’d make a note of the address and then I’d use my reference books to find how the house originally appeared in the old catalogs. Then I’d take a photo of the house from the same angle that it appeared in the 1910s or 1920s catalog.

In those three weeks, I took 1,500 photos of 200+ houses. That’s a lot of photos.

And then I returned home. I’ve never been so glad to get on an airplane in my life!

Here are a few of my favorite photos:

Nice Sears Corona in Central Illinois

Sears Ashmore in Central Illinois

Model #196 in Southwestern Illinois

A nice Westly in Metropolis, Illinois (Home of Superman!)

Sears Hollywood in Southern Illinois

Sears Edgemere in Central Illinois

Sears Puritan in Southern Illinois, near the mill in Cairo