A Writer's Beginning

I am now in the fortunate position to meet other authors. At least three of these authors I have clicked with and we message, text or email one another fairly regularly. I have a couple writers in my network also I keep in touch with.

I was thinking about how I came to be a writer tonight. First of all, I had a mother who guided all of us and never stifled our creativity. She encouraged us to be ourselves. She tore down hallway walls and had Dad build in bookcases down the length of those halls, filling the shelves with books. When we brought home those scholastic book club flyers from school she always let us pick a couple books apiece, even when Dad was out of work, hospital bills were pouring in, and money was tight. We all got three new books apiece and shared them. My sister is four years older, my brother a year younger. Her books were at an older level but we could read whatever we wanted to. If it was in the bookcase we could take the book and read it. I spent hours sprawled on the green carpet in the hallway reading, the cat curled up beside me. I kept my favorite books on a bookshelf in my room. We all had a bookshelf, and the living room had more bookshelves.

I was a shy little girl. I would freeze up when it came to speaking to people. But I could write from the time I could hold a pencil. Kelly wrote her first story, Harold the Shoe, in first grade. I think I was in first grade when I wrote a story about a lion in a zoo. My desk was full of little stories and then poems. At age thirteen I put together two books of poetry- by this I mean I handwrote poems on lined notebook paper, added little illustrations that I colored with colored pencils, and then tied the pages together with colorful yarn.

In high school I wrote short prose and poetry. I contributed to the high school arts & literary magazine, The Galaxy. I liked to do pen & ink drawings also. This continued through college. I started out as an English major and finished one and a half years before switching colleges and majors, earning a bachelors degree in criminal justice. I worked on the college literary magazine and contributed.

I graduated, got a few different jobs (retail sales, store detective, campus police office, campus police supervisor on the night shift, and then injection mold machine operator at LEGO making toy bricks. I got married. We bought a house. We had Kelly and I became a stay at home Mom for three years.

I continued to write. I drew pictures for her. When she was four I wrote stories for her, and Monsters No More was published in a children's anthology of teaching and healing stories (it was a story about a Mom teaching her child how to cope with the monsters in her closet and under her bed by using her super power of imagination). I wrote an article about how our adopted cat left our house on East Mountain and hiked (in 6 days) all the way back to my Mom and Dad's house where he'd been a stray hanging around in their yard. He had to cross the Westfield River to get there. It was a total of about 8 miles. He vanished on a Thursday evening after John had fed him a huge piece of meatloaf, and turned up downtown on Wednesday at lunch time, which was when I would take Kelly down to have lunch with her grandparents. My sister found him in the yard waiting for us by my truck! We brought him home, had him neutered and enjoyed the pleasure of his companionship for ten years. He was Kelly's best bud growing up. Then I co-authored an article about how I helped a friend in New Mexico win a family member's antique Steiff teddy bear in an ebay auction when all the relative's household goods went to auction because she'd left no will. Darcy didn't have an ebay account, so I stayed up until two AM and placed the winning bid for the bear her aunt had promised her. We both wrote our stories and wove them into a coherent text about how two friends living practically across country from one another worked together to get the bear into the hands of the person it had been promised to. It was published in the UK in a teddy bear collector's magazine.

I wrote all sorts of stories for Kelly when she was growing up, and continued to read to here every night until she was in sixth grade. I read books above her age and reading level because she was ready for them. I had read to her from the time she was a tiny baby. I'd sit in the white wicker rocker in her room feeding her a bottle by nightlight and show her pictures in picture books, and read her simple stories like Goodnight, Moon and The Runaway Bunny. I never parked her in front of the television. We colored, cut up paper and did projects, listened to music from a variety of cultures (she still listens to Irish music and Zuchero, an Italian singer/musician who sings in English and Italian). And we read. I never denied her books. Her TV viewing was controlled by me. I let her rest and watch Winnie The Pooh videos mid-afternoon when she was little. She never developed a TV habit, even though her father has the TV on from the time he gets home to the time he goes to bed. She and I sit in the kitchen and do our own thing to this day.

I noticed, as she was growing up, that she had a vocabulary that was lightyears ahead of her peers. At two she nearly fell on the back cement stairs which are part of the walkway, managed to catch her balance and said, "That could have been a catastrophe!" At three she and her Grandpa were marching around the dining room table in Greek fisherman hats and she called to me, "Mom! We're having a procession!" Children have hungry brains that absorb everything they see, hear and experience like thirsty sponges. The best time to feed those hungry brains is when they are young.

My daughter grew up reading everything I've written (even stuff that was not meant for her eyes when she'd sneak into the filing cabinet and my notebooks when she was home alone- but it was nothing too terrible, and it wasn't the liquor cabinet so I can't really complain!) She is an avid reader to this day, and she writes. She has two novels written and some partials.

I never wrote a novel until 2011. I wrote a lot of short stories, novelettes and novellas. I didn't think I had it in me to write a full novel. It's Kelly who encouraged me to dig deeper and do it. She was doing the NaNoWriMo challenge in November with her roommate and told me about it, telling me I had to do it with her in 2012. I thought about it, and then for the heck of it decided to write a novel in March of 2012 just to see if I could do it. It took me 23 days to write the novel, leaving me seven days to proofread and edit it. I was pleased with myself, and she was proud of me and liked the novel (The Victoria Wayfarer Investigation-a Ghost Chasers novel) My NaNo novels have been Talon:An Intimate Familiarity, Medea, The Fairlawn Investigation-A Ghost Chasers novel, actually the first in the series because I had started a story with the characters years ago and Kelly kept hounding me to finish it, so I made it my novel and got it done for her), and Life Skills. Talon:An Intimate Familiarity and The Subtlety of Light & Shadow were my 2013 and 2015 Golden Heart entries in the annual Romance Writers of America contest. I am not a true romance writer although my novels have elements of romance in them. Talon did better than I expected while Subtlety of Light & Shadow earned a 7.63 out of 10, with one judge rating a 10 all around, but high and low scores were dropped and the other three scores added and divided by three to get the final score. I was still very pleased by that.

During this time I began writing articles for the Massachusetts State Button Society Bulletin, and took over as editor in 2007. I put together the entire 42-page magazine every year through 2016 with just Kelly's help editing photos and managing the advertising. The local Crescent Button Club, of which I am a member, contributed the bulk of the articles for each issue. I wrote articles and filler pieces. For ten years it was a labor of love from December 30th throughl the end of March. The magazine was made available at the April MSBS button show each year with paid dues. I created eye-catching covers, all the inside pages including a list of Officers & Directors, Clubs and contact info, show schedules, table of content, the Northeast Regional Button Association page advertising their annual show, theme and schedule, the membership list, directions to the venues, etc, plus edit and arrange all the articles and photos to make every page appealing. I am a master with Microsoft Publisher now! I reluctantly resigned as editor this past spring with the current issue for a number of reasons. No one stepped up to take on the task, which was disheartening, but many state button bulletins are disappearing as button societies turn to publishing articles on websites and blogs. Kelly manages the Massachusetts Button Society blog and facebook pages and will post articles there as they are submitted. So far no one has submitted anything, but that's not surprising since trying to get contributions was like pulling teeth- and that was my biggest frustration! The club and I just burned out after ten years of doing it all!

I got into self publishing because in 2014 Medea was my winning NaNo novel. One of the winner's goodies was two free copies of my novel from CreateSpace. I ignore winners goodies, but they extended the deadline to use them to May 30th of 2015. So I figured, why not get a free paperback copy of my novel. I went in and did it on my own- totally clueless about the whole process. I just followed the steps and got my two free books.

They were really bad because there were no headers, footers, page numbers, copyright info, or an author's bio or anything- just the text copy and a title page I created as a first page.

Kelly rolled her eyes. We went back in and she said, "You know you need to put in this and this and this....and you can change the font type and the colors and it'll look a lot better!" My head was spinning. She redid the book for me and it was much better- it's still the current version although I need to fix a few things I've noticed in the story that no one else who've read it have pointed out yet, but it glares in my mind!

After that first self published book I decided to self publish the backlog of stories and novels in binders in the dining room to get the binders out of there. Books are easier to shelf than binders. I put together my annual Christmas stories (27 written, 24 are now in three volumes, the other three are in the novels that are tied to them- Talon:The Familiarity of It All, The Archetypes-Shockwaves and Life Skills). Then I put together my annual Halloween stories into three volumes. Then I started doing the novels.

When I do something, I just do it. I kind of flooded Amazon with quite a few books. I did goodreads giveaways and developed a following. I have a local following. For a year I worked quietly on my own just getting my books done, getting them registered with the Library of Congress (I'm well known at the post office here in town and in Southampton now). I put together a Cozy Winter's Night gift basket with my Christmas story books and other items like a fleece throw, hot cocoa and tea mixes, cookies, sweets, a pretty mug, etc for their Friends of the Southwick Library basket raffle. I was invited to the Articulture event here in town in April of 2016. I did a book signing at the Agawam Public Library's READLocal event. I have an upcoming book signing at the bookclub bookstore & more store here in town in October and have attended a number of author events there, meeting some great writers and authors, adding their books to my library. I have a speaker engagement booked for February 1st 2017, and was just contacted by a woman I met last year via email when she contacted me about a small photo on my charmstring museum blog site. She recognized Miss Jennie Moxley and had Jennie's story for me. She just emailed me this week to ask me if I'd be interested in co-authoring an article on Miss Jennie for the National Button Society Bulletin. Being a button collector since 2003) which is how I stumbled upon the little carte de visite of Miss Jennie in the first place, I readily agreed to work with her. She identifies people in old photos and dates them for historical purposes.

A year ago I was quietly self publishing books and not making a big deal of it- just sharing them with my circle of family, friends and acquaintances. Now I am involved in the arts & cultural group here in town, doing book signings, chatting with other authors who message me and email me out of the blue, and stressing about public appearances because I am not a great speaker by any means. I am a writer. But, I guess I'll manage.

I'm very fortunate to have the support and encouragement of a great group of people in my home town and beyond (as far south as Mississippi, west as New Mexico and north as Vermont.)

So, this, in a nutshell, is how I started as a writer.