When I was about 5 our TV broke and it stayed that way long enough for me and my sisters to discover a lifelong love of reading. As the middle child, I was forced to take it up a notch. In my mid-teens I was at a secondhand store and fell in love with a manual typewriter that had cursive keys. It cost about $10 more than I had on hand and weighed, to my unexercised arms, a ton. I was forced to hide it behind some house wares and hope that it was there when I came back. It took me longer than I thought to guilt my mother into giving me the $10 and a ride, but I did it even though I had to return once in the meantime to make sure the typewriter was still were I'd hidden it. She gave me the $10 except she flaked on giving me a ride and I ended up carrying the thing home.(My first experience of suffering for my craft.)

I started pecking out short stories and informational pamphlets that I'd give to my sisters who were nice enough to read them. At the time, I thought I was just fooling around. I certainly didn't consider what I was doing writing. I'd never gotten the hang of knitting so for me this was the next best thing.

At the tail end of my junior college career, when I was ready to get real and get a job, my mother suggested that I try something to do with writing. I scoffed, something I'd gotten very good at as a middle child. Shortly thereafter I was forced to drop my algebra class due to a sever math disability and needed another class to maintain my full-time status. My sister had mentioned she was having a good educational time in her Mass Communications 101 class. On the last day to add I exhorted Mr. Michael Eberts to let me add which he did even though I knew I was imposing on his already full roster. I ended up getting an A and he asked if I'd be interested in taking his next class which focused on news writing. And so it was that I discovered I could not only learn a skill and get a job but that I could combine both and do something I loved, writing.

I went on to transfer as a journalism major and, for a time, made an actual living as a writer happily toiling for websites and freelancing for magazines. Then life circumstances changed (remember the dot.com crash?) and I found myself with no job and a newborn. Since I had nothing else to lose, I decided to try my hand at fiction and, well, that’s a whole other story.