There is something to be said for a book that can take you out of your world, if even just for an hour every day, and place you into the life of someone else. Displacing your own problems with someone fictional.
I started reading at a young age. The first real novels I came to love were from the Nancy Drew series. I must've read them all from the local library. And as I got older my tastes matured and darkened slightly. Stephen King was at the top of my list and the authors that followed were Dean Koontz, Poppy Z. Brite, Michael Connelly, and James Patterson. I couldn't get enough! Each novel or short story transported me to the trials and tribulations of someone that, through words, I had grown to care about.
In grade school I began writing. Silly things like cutesy poems and short stories about being a kid. Once in high school I gained some of the darkness that my favorite authors used so well. I wrote an array of short stories in hopes of possibly being published in the literary magazine I worked on at school. From alien abductions to high school parties crashed by serial killers. Even stories that ended happily began fatally.
I didn't start off college with the idea of becoming a writer. Computers seemed like the route for me. I loved being on the computer, communicating with people around the world, and thinking about programs I could create that might make the lives of others even easier someday. But that quickly ended when I realized just how many horrible math classes I'd have to take to earn my degree. Luckily, in my first semester I had also taken a creative writing course in order to fulfill one of my electives. And, of course, I fell in love. Writing was no longer a hobby in my mind. Working with words is what I wanted to do forever!
From there I eventually earned my B.A. in English and then went on to complete my M.A. in Writing Popular Fiction. I work now as a Copy Editor for a local government agency, but my creative spirit always awaits a moment to work on something of my own. Not a day goes by that I don't think about writing, though I will say that a few years went by that I barely wrote a thing creatively. And in the past few months, something suddenly changed.
I am married now with a 2 year old amazing daughter. And for the past few years I haven't written. My completed novel has awaited my fine tuning, and nothing new has landed on paper. But in the past 2 months I've made a pact with myself that it's time to jump start things. Why? My reasons for wanting to pursue my dreams of writing fiction again lie within my daughter. I want her to grow up to not only know that she can be whatever she wants to be as long as she works hard for it, but also to grow up knowing that her parents worked hard to achieve something they had a passion for. I don't necessarily plan to make it rich and be as successful as some of the writers I adore so much. But I want someone to read my stories and truly like them, and maybe even have them inspire dreams of their own. I don't want to be an aspiring author anymore, I want to be an author who can tell people she meets where you can buy her book. I worked very hard to get where I am today, what's a little more work to fulfill all of my dreams?
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