The inspiration to become a writer probably came with subtle hints when I was quite young.  I began making up my own stories as entertainment for my three younger siblings when I was nine and the responsibility for their care was placed on me while my mother worked double shifts as a waitress.  It was in the mid-fifties and television wasn’t a luxury we owned.  Considering we lived miles from any neighbors with children our age, it left us to invent games among ourselves once the sun went down and it was too dark for climbing the rocks, cliffs and trees that surrounded us in Oak Creek Canyon.

My mother concluded that I had too vivid of an imagination when it came to my story telling because I sometimes managed to convince my siblings that the stories I told could be true ; stories of cowboys and Indians, UFOs, wild animals, and magic.

I never thought of writing my stories down until I was a sophomore in high school in Flagstaff and my English teacher gave the class an assignment to write a short story.  She conveyed that the story needed to be short and convincing in ten pages or less.

I quickly put my mental wheels into motion and before the hour class was up I’d written my short story, a humorous one.  When I placed it on the teacher’s desk on my way out she cast me a dubious glance that said she didn’t believe I’d spent enough time perfecting my literary piece.

The next day when I came to class the teacher grinned as she held the story out in front of her  and read it to the class before handing it back to me with a big bold “A,” written in red, placed at the top.

“This is an exceptionally good story,” she said, “although I had my doubts when you turned it in so quickly yesterday.  I thought it might be plagiarism at first when I began to read the dialogue, but as I read through it, I definitely saw differently.   The dialogue was superb.  You have an exceptional talent young lady.  I hope you pursue a future in writing of some sort.  In fact, I suggest that you enroll in the Journalism class next year.”

When I attempted to enroll in the journalism class that next year, the counselor signing me up for my various classes told me that the journalism class was already full and there were no other writing classes available to me.  After all, the counselor pointed out, I didn’t plan to go on to college and get a degree in anything because I was only seeking a general education.  Considering my family couldn’t afford to send me to college to major in anything, I was left out to dry when it came to classes that might help me to attain a goal of becoming a writer.

The kids from Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon seemed to be left out of a lot of the more desirable classes at the high school, considering the administration at that time felt we were not “high quality” students worthy of anything short of the standard non-descript general education classes.  We rode the school bus thirty miles one way to school up Oak Creek Canyon and we couldn’t stay in the evening to participate in after school activities if we didn’t have a car and didn’t drive.

Over the years I never lost the desire to write.  When I had children of my own, the urge became more pronounced, but I didn’t pursue writing actively.  Throughout my twenties I wrote in spiral binders and hid the binders away, not wanting anyone to read what I was convinced was drivel.   My sense of low self esteem didn’t allow me to entertain the thought that what I wrote might be something someone else might want to read.

In the later 80s, when my husband bought me an electric Smith Corona typewriter that had a memory card, I thought I had finally arrived.  I had been secretly typing what I’d written in the binders up on typing paper using an old manual Smith Corona left to my husband when his stepfather passed away when I was twenty-six.   The electric typewriter gave me the freedom to type out what was in my mind as quickly as it occurred to me.  My fingers gliding over the keyboard was like magic, and the characters who resided in my head came to life on paper.

When I purchased my first computer in 1992, it was an Insight computer.  It was a humongous monstrosity of a tower that had a whopping 270 megabytes of hard drive.  It was a dinosaur that cost me nearly $4,000!  The only problem was it had a glitch and it didn’t work.  I promptly got onto the phone and called the Insight Company in Phoenix that had put the computer together, and their technician got on the phone.

By this point in time my husband had established a business of heavy duty diesel engine repair in a shop we built on our property.  I was his mechanic’s helper.  We traveled throughout northern California working on gigantic logging equipment with engine compartments that you needed a ladder to climb up into.  As my husband’s mechanic’s helper, I donned coveralls and turned wrenches along beside him for over eighteen years.  When I wasn’t needed beside him, I busied myself sitting in our pickup truck writing in those spiral binders.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When my husband came into the house for lunch the day after my computer arrived by UPS, he nearly had a heart attack.  He found me in the middle of my office floor with the computer scattered in pieces across the floor.

“What are you doing?”  His eyes were as big as saucers and his mouth hung down to his chest.

“Be quiet, I’m talking to a technician,” I scolded him in a whisper, putting my hand over the phone’s mouth piece that I held in my hand.  He quietly turned and left the room to make his own lunch; it was obvious I was too busy to make it for him that day.

I spent nearly two weeks off and on, on the phone with the technicians at Insight, with various circuit boards and etc. arriving by UPS at my home every few days for me to install and see whether it would solve the problem.  In the second week a technician asked me to go back to the motherboard and find a specific set of switches.  It turned out that whoever had assembled my computer hadn’t opened the right sequences of switches on the motherboard.   Needless to say, during those two weeks I learned a lot and I lost my apprehension and fear of what might be inside that monster of a tower.   I look at my laptop today and I can’t believe the advancement of technology and computers in the past twenty years.

When I finally got my Insight computer up and running, I began writing my first novel, Maggie: The Early Years.  Although the book is a work of fiction, it was a story I felt compelled to write in order to preserve some of the stories my mother had told of her childhood growing up on a farm in Arkansas and later Oklahoma.

As my characters took over and the story seemed to write itself, the length of the book grew.  Soon I had so many pages that I was compelled to split the book into a series of books and I published Maggie’s story as a trilogy.

Maggie: The Early Years

Red Sky: The Sequel to Maggie

Return of the Trogon: The Sequel to Red Sky