In fact, English was my least liked subject in school. I was good at it like any other language I learned, but I much preferred mathematics or science to language arts. So is it a surprise that I'm a writer? It is to me.
When you ask most authors why they write you will get a variety of answers. The most frequent heard would have to be, "There was something in me that had to come out," or a variance of it. That isn't my story. I wrote my feelings and impressions down in a journal. I wrote about my day as most children and teenager do. I actually did this in four languages to keep my writing skills up. Overkill, probably but it was how I retained things and memorized them. Not that my phono and photographic memory didn't do that too.
So what changed? Well, I had a daughter diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis (JRA). I could not find out much about it in magazines or books except for medical abstracts. So I wrote from an anger perspective about having a daughter with this disease. Even though I wrote the articles and subsequently the nonfiction, I still didn't see myself as an author or writer.
In my mind, I was an angry parent with a child with a devastating disease that almost nothing was written about from a parent's perspective. Mommie, I Wish I'd Never Heard of Arfritis was born.Yes, I did type out a manuscript based on a longer version of each point I mentioned in my articles, but that's expansion not really an author, right? I sold my rights and royalties, present and future, to the Arthritis Foundation. Yes after thirty plus years, I still receive statements of charitable contributions for book sales. But I was a life flight nurse not a writer. That was my focus...my calling at the time. My true calling was to be a doctor, but with children at home I couldn't run off to med school. But I continues publishing articles mainly out of frustration because I couldn't find them and more books followed.
So spring ahead a decade, I was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In other words a rooted severe depression. So what did the therapist have me do...journal with drawings. So once again I started writing. A lot of skeletons started popping out of my mental closet where they had lain buried for decades. I had already been raped, divorced, single mother of four, disabled, and a host of other life events. Was it any wonder I had PTSD? I'd had more things happen to me in thirty years than most people had happen to them in a lifetime.
So writing was my uncalling. I made good money as a international business consultant and as a chef. Meanwhile my journals I kept during therapy smoldered in the background. I decided to write novels because no one would believe that all these things could happen to one person in their life. My first novel was horrible. Even now, I cringe at the thought that it would be ever published. Fact is more terrifying than fiction in some cases.
I liked the way writing stories around the skeletons in my closet made me feel so I wrote another manuscript, then another and so on. Meanwhile I joined to several critique groups and writing groups to hone my skills. Writing was never meant to be a full time job. It was something to do in my spare time. It was fun creating and exorcising demons. I felt better about my life because of it. I got satisfaction from writing. Then came the advent of indie publishing which was a rejuvenated and reconstructed form of vanity press. The rest is history for the uncalled author.
