Years ago, writing a book was a mere idea in the back of my mind, something that I wanted to try, but I had no clue how to start.  Working with my sister, to write about our home-life was my first idea. She was always very good at English and because she said she was the “Smart sister” and I was the “Pretty sister,” I thought she should help me, but she was not at all interested, so I forgot about it and did my housewife and mother of three adolescent boys thing, which kept me plenty busy.

This might sound crazy, but somehow, I found myself talking to a psychic, who I thought might have answers to the questions I had about my life, and he encouraged me to write a book.  I thought, “Oh there it is, that dream I had considered awhile back,”so I thought about it, even prayed about it, but didn’t pursue it any further. Because I was a bit of a “psychic junkie,”back in my forties, I talked to yet another psychic, a woman this time who said, “You should write a book.”

Now having had to repeat English I, in college, it seemed like clear evidence to me that I was not qualified to write, but the idea poked at me a few times. Then I remembered Mrs. Evans, a teacher in my senior year of high school, who said something about a paper I had written, that it was insightful and she liked it, so I thought, just try it.

The only trouble was, I had little computer experience, so I asked my son, who was about 15 at the time how to get on a blank screen to type on our family computer, so he opened it up for me and I began to type. And then I typed some more, until I had 1000, yes,1000 pages of single line sentences, bad sentences, and no paragraphs.

In the meantime, someone had hooked me up with a great editor and writer, in California, a man, who told me I would have  to make paragraphs and separate them into chapters. “I thought you would do that,” I said. I remember him laughing. “No, no you will have to do that.”  So I did- it wasn’t fun but I did it. He said after my story was completed, that it reminded him of some sculptures by Michelangelo. They were unfinished works of human figures that looked like they were emerging from a big blob of stone. I thought that was a cool analogy.

So that is the story of how I began to write.  I did a couple of magazine articles, 2 anthologies of short stories collaborating with 99 other authors and then my memoir and first book, Love, Lisa My Spiritual Journey from Compulsive Overeating to my current first fiction novel, Grace Alone, which is the first book in my trilogy The Grace Chronicles.