I’m Different and I Like it…But then again, aren’t we all?

I started writing when I was a kid. We moved to Florida from Virginia, and I wrote about some of the new, odd things I saw, like a lizard and palm trees. I seemed to have an imagination, too. At age eight, I wrote a story about finding a dinosaur in my uncle’s barn. He and everyone else in my family got quite a kick out of that. There was also a story about a talking horse that warned its owner about a man she was going to marry. I set up chapters, but never finished it.

Poetry was my outlet for venting through adolescence. I never showed most of those poems to anyone, until my friend asked to read one of my poems to her class as an assignment. She said it made one girl cry, and that’s when I felt like I might have a voice. I squandered this voice all through my marriage though, and even had dreams about this captive voice I never let out. How coincidental is it, then, that I so frequently suffered from laryngitis? Becoming a mom was a wonderful experience, but after two years, I knew that my lifestyle and my husband’s would never gel, nor would our ideas on child-rearing, and I became a divorcee at age 30. I still do not regret it.

Through my thirties, during my divorce and journey to deal with my attitudes toward alcoholism in my family and then my marriage, I journaled a lot. Poetry comforted me as well, and I entered an online contest. A poem I wrote on motherhood was published in an anthology, and it was wonderful to see my work in print even if I did have to buy the book myself. I published my own book of poetry in 2006, a book which is no longer actively in print, though I have a few of them around the house. Online writing, through Myspace blogs, Blogspot, and eventually Wordress kept me healthy for a few years. There were some short stories, poems, and many reflective entries. It was still a dream of mine to publish a work of fiction.

I started writing a story in 2014. It was very personal and I still don’t know if I’ll publish it, but it was a fiction release of many anxiety riddled emotions. Tablio encouraged me to develop a short fiction habit in 2015. At that time, I was binge-watching Mad Men over the summer, which is a showcase of many creative type characters with serious personal flaws. I think it made me hungry to produce and perhaps even publish. I wanted to publish fiction in ways that would use my experiences but not tell them to the world. I wanted to display characters with family issues and great inner strength. I started to follow some writer’s groups on Facebook, where I learned a lot. I took to Wattpad and entered a science fiction love story in a contest. I didn’t win, though I did gain comments and some praise. This encouraged me to continue the story and I eventually self-published it on Kindle Direct Publishing as a novella titled Made for Me. Let’s be honest, I am not comfortable with the romance genre, so it does not follow the formula. Yet, some readers have given it high acclaim. It moves through twenty years in the life of an unusual couple. Then, I was able to write the sequel, Seeing Through Sampson’s Eyes, which was wrought with tension and challenges and a more clearly defined conflict. I also self-published it on KDP. This book gave me the chance, as it does the reader, to walk in the shoes of Norrie, a character who is everything I wish I had been in my early twenties. It is my goal to grow with each book I write, and not to just “stick to a formula.”

I love to write sci-fi, maybe because it comments on society, it introduces new challenges, and it requires characters to emerge as true warriors. Sometimes anxiety has been a problem for me in life. Yet, being able to write a plot with nerve-wracking conflict or tension gives me the opportunity to resolve it. Even if the resolution is not a neat, clean solution to the problem. Some readers have told me that my use of dialogue and character development are strong points, so the goal is to keep that element but not to write all of my books in the same way.

My next published book will be titled Detours in Time, my first full-length novel of an odd couple who travel to the future. It is planned for release in mid-June, and I plan to have a fun Facebook event as part of my launch, so please follow my author Facebook through the link below!

Thank you for reading the story of my journey as a writer. I am also an avid reader, dog-lover, and very close to my family. I still work full-time and try to balance it all. My dream is to retire one day, practice yoga several times a week, and write even more!

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