I began writing because I felt as an Expat with some 10 years experience of living in Spain I had some knowledge to share with other Expats.
My first readers were the readership of 'The Inland Magazine'
I started reading science fiction as a kid. The first novel I read was either Andre Norton's Daybreak 2250 A. D. or Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel. It was so long ago, I simply can't remember.
I started writing in grade school -- yes, they actually called it that way back then. I read a lot, and knew very early on I wanted to write for a living.
The first to read what I wrote were those who read science fiction fanzines in the 1960's. I had a number of short stories published in these amateur magazines, and even produced one for a few issues.
When I was young, I was all about Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume. I couldn't get enough. I was also a big fan of Harriet the Spy and Who Put That Hair in My Toothbrush? Those are the books I remember clearly.
I always wrote, keeping a diary and doing short stories. But, I never really let anyone read my stuff. The first people who had the pleasure of doing that were my teachers.
I first started reading...comics. As one of the youngest children in my family I was an eternal gatherer of hand-me-downs and one of the best things I 'inherited' was comic books, principally the likes of Beano, DC Comics...
I first began writing seriously at the age of nine when I started my first diary...
Nobody read my diary and throughout school and college few would have known that I would choose to become a writer and therefore my first proper 'readers' were actually other writers from my home city of Manchester...
In 1964 my mother marched me and 3 siblings down to the Portsmouth Public Library and integrated the place. Every Saturday I would check out ten books and read them. I quickly ran through the children's section and pretty much made my way through Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Russian novelists, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemmingway by myself.
I used to write little short plays that usually starred me as a Cinderella type trapped in a boring, mundane, (did I mention boring) life? I imagined parents who were in the secret military and unable to keep me with them which is why I had been consigned to perpetual montony with my fake parents.
I remember once my father found one of my fantasy scripts. And, as best he could, made some grammatical corrections.
Mainly the first books i read were the Hardy Boys Mysteries then on to Sci-Fi and Westerns. I tried writing even when in the 6th grade, quite amateurish. I have written a lot of song lyrics. Finally just a few years ago i thought i would try to get into writing the way a lot of people do - writing short stories for magazines. I wrote like 5 sci-fi stories and sent them to several mags - all rejected. Then i got an idea of how to take 4 of them and makes them chapters for a book idea that came to me. Now, i'm on Book 5, a spin-off series from it - i got all my song lyrics in a book, a big music trivia book and a bible scripture book - i have more ideas and will continue both sci-fi series. My daughter was the first to read my sci-fi books - in fact, she became my proof reader for my first 3 books.
I guess I first read "Dick and Jane" stories at school and Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairytales, and Hans Christian Andersen stories. I've always loved fantasy and fairytales. I went to parochial school, where English was really stressed and I enjoyed writing compositions, especially if they involved story telling. My teachers were of course, the first to read what I wrote and then my parents, when they came up to school on open school night, as they called it then. I worked hard to get my gold stars and see my parents smile with pride when they found my composition hanging on the classroom wall . . . with that prized little star!
I was a huge fan of Walter Farley's "Black Stallion" and "Island Stallion" books -- and everything else about horses I could get my hands on. "My Friend Flicka," "King of the Wind," etc. etc. and so on... Things changed when I saw "Star Wars" (the first film I ever saw in a theater) at age 8 -- and by 10 or 11 I was reading Harlan Ellison, Andre Norton, Alan Dean Foster, positively devouring science fiction and fantasy almost exclusively until a great teacher in high school got me into "Literature" w/a capital "L." In college, I focused more on classics out of necessity and discovered a love for Cervantes, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov (my 4 C's) among others... I went through a phase of vampire fiction around the end of college, and my husband introduced me to comics and graphic novels by way of "The Crow" and "Sandman."
I was an artist as a kid -- used to draw horses and things so much everyone in the family figured that was my future and my big talent. At some point, I was making little illustrated storybooks -- and over time the text took up more and more space than the pictures did. When "Star Wars" came on HBO for the first time, I watched it numerous times and started writing scenes for Han Solo, my favorite character, because I didn't think he got enough screen time. Those scenes formed the basis of a science fiction story of my own, the character morphing into someone else. I finished it as a novel around age 19; it was as terrible as you'd expect. But I resurrected it about 10 years later and it became Racing History, my 5-volume series.
Of course my mother was probably the first person to read me. But I foisted my stuff off on friends and family as much as I could. I have a voracious appetite for feedback, love talking about the stories (as if they were something I'm reading rather than writing) with anyone who'll read them... I'm basically just a geeky "fan-girl" at heart.   | | |
I began writing in high school; mostly poetry and short stories. Over the years, marriage, children and career took center stage, and writing was almost nonexistent for me for a long while.
This past year I took a different position (moving out of the classroom as a second grade teacher and into a role as Reading Intervention teacher for fourth grade) that left me with more free time.
Thus my New Year's resolution was to write more. By March I had the completed first draft of a novel, entitled "Second Chance" completed, and picked up by a publishing company! It's been a roller coaster ride ever since.
The first people to read what I wrote were my parents and several close friends with whom I work. They gave me invaluable advice and opinions which helped to make the story even better.
The "Doctor Doolittle" books by Hugh Lofting. An English teacher at Iowa State was the first to read what I had written.
I read my father's adult books he kept in the den - hundreds of them: Elmer Gantry, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Story of O..those are the ones that come to mind. I always hated childrens' books even as a child.
The first writing I did was in my little red diary and that caused a lot of trouble for me when my mother read it - she had no concept of fiction, so she thought what I was writing was true.
As an adult, I didn't start writing until 1999 when I went back to finish my degree at The New School. Lots of poetry and fiction and memoir workshops, where we read each other's work. I like the classes best where we read someone else's work out loud.
My first book was Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne. I remember all of Verne's books and it made me want to be a writer. I started writing in 5th grade and the first people to read my work and encourage me were my teachers. I am something of a changeling in my family. I was considered bookish and isolated growing up. I spent all of my free time reading and re-reading the few books I had. They are treasured friends.
I'll first start reading Jawi (Arab Skrip) at the age 3 yrs old. The first book is about the history of Islamic warrior story book such as Saidina Ali, Saidina Hamzah etc. I started to write at the age of 15 (1949) when I first saw the praying mantis mating at my family paddy field. The anxiety to write about it because the female eats up the male after mating and start writing in a piece of paper that was available to me since I come from a poor family. It was my father who read it and later who gives support to me to continue writing and that's it until now I'm still writing at my free time and never stop.
I guess I'd have to say that I've been reading all my life. While I remember having books at a very young age, I recently was asked which was my favorite. It sparked a search within me, and the answer I came up with was a book I read in my "tween-age" year (11) called "Twixt Twelve and Twenty," by Pat Boone. There have been many years since when reading has not taken priority, but in looking back, it seems that the majority of what I have read has been Christian material. Christian reading material and Christian music is always uplifting and inspiring to me.
How I began to write is quite a story of God's grace. Never, ever did I give thought to being an author. But God had the plan. Here's how it went (excerpt taken from my first book, "One Foot On A Banana Peel ... Looking Through Grief to the God of all Comfort.")
“Would you like to move back to Iraan,” Jerry asked me. “Tommie & I have been praying about it ever since I made the decision to retire from Marathon. We believe that now is the time, and God is calling us into full-time prison ministry. Do you want to join us?” I had been working with Jerry & Tommie in prison ministry ever since they started … 15 years, at that point. So, of course I said, “Yessss!!!”
So began a long series of events which led to writing my first book, “One Foot On A Banana Peel.” “One Foot…” is a description of grief and an expression of the hope and healing that lie beyond trauma and tragedy. The simple experience of moving in itself can be a cause for grief, and I’m not so sure I wasn’t actually experiencing some of those emotions at the time. I had been widowed in March of 1988. Raising two young children, working and moving three times during the course of those years ~ yes, I wanted to continue in prison ministry, but I was also sure I was feeling some “trauma” over the upcoming move.
Shortly after I moved back to Iraan, Tommie came to me with an offer. She felt it was time to expand our ministry and move into the area of counseling in the “free-world,” (A term used by those in the prison system, referring to anyone who is not incarcerated). She asked if I wanted to join them in taking some courses. So, off we went to Crockett, Texas, to attend school at Therapon Institute, where we later became licensed belief therapists. During the course of our schooling, we had to write a 10-page paper on any subject for which a person might come to us for counseling. Up to that point, there had been 11 deaths of immediate family members in about 7 or 8 years. So, it seemed appropriate for me to write on the topic of grief.
My 10-page paper turned out to be 29 pages long! The Director of the Institute said it was a good work, and that I should turn it into a seminar. So, I spent the rest of that year and part of the next, writing and re-writing. Condensing and expanding. Dealing with life’s problems, and adding what I had learned to what I had already written.
One major thing I learned in the process of all this, was that it seemed most people had the idea that grief only occurred when a loved one passed on. This is just NOT TRUE, nor is it Scriptural. There are a multitude of causes for grief, and there varying degrees of its intensity. Most of us experience it to one degree or another, and usually more than once during the course of our lifetimes. So, what about it … is there any HOPE???
Well, of course there is! And HOPE was what I wanted to share in the writing of that paper. Hope is still what I want to share. The hope that can come through even that long, dark tunnel of grief. The hope and healing that lie beyond trauma and tragedy. There have been many other trials, temptations and struggles in our lives since the deaths of all those family members, all of which produced symptoms and stages of he grief process in varying levels and degrees. Any one of these events could have had major destructive power in my life.
But the inspiration for the writing of “One Foot…” came to me one evening shortly after that when my sister (my only sibling) called to inform me that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. My reaction to her dilemma surprised me. I was REALLY angry! I felt that ONE MORE TIME my hands were tied. Here was ONE MORE TRAGEDY that I could do nothing about. While I definitely do not have one foot on a banana peel and the other one in a grave, the reality of the situation was that I was too old to start over again … become a doctor so I can “fix” this situation, or begin in research to find a cure for cancer so my sister could be healed.
At some point during this tirade, I began to pray. It was while I was thinking about all these things and praying, that God spoke to my mind and heart. He said, “Take all that you wrote about grief and put it into book format. Reach as many hearts as you can with the light of HOPE.” Thus began my writing career, and my first book, ”One Foot On A Banana Peel,” was born.
My Heavenly Father sustained me through all of those experiences that could have devastated me and my family. He sustains me still. He was the One who created hope in the first place. It is He who planted hope within my soul. So, I give honor and glory to him through the writing that I do. But it is YOU that I’m writing for. It is YOU who I pray finds hope within the pages of the books and seminars I write. It is YOU whom I know that God wants to bless with peace and HOPE. He sustained me … and He will sustain you. | | |
The first book I ever owned was "The ABC Book". It must have made an impression on me, because I still remember the cover. It had a drawing of a giant apple on it. Inside were pictures of fruit with letters beside them. I was fascinated with this book. It was the first time I realized that putting letters together created meaningful things called words.
How did I begin to write? I don't remember. I'm guessing that writing evolved from coloring outside the lines on my coloring book. I probably made my first letter unknowingly.
My parents were the first people to read my work. Then again, maybe I showed my first story to my cat. |
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