Bonafide hustler making my name.

I know I'm not the first person in the history of the world to boldly announce that I am going to write a book. We'd be missing out on a lot of Danielle Steele, Nicholas Sparks and Tori Spelling, and hundreds of other novels both good and bad, if that wasn't the case.

I just want to assure everyone that I do have a basis for this. It's not as if I just woke up one morning and said, "Yeah, I'm going to write a book." Well, that did sort of happen, but it was 24 years ago and I can't quite remember how it all went down. Paging through a magazine (because, shocker, I didn't have the Internet when I was nine and you found out these sorts of things from newspapers and magazines back in the Stone Age) I think I found some information about a writing contest.

"Why not?" I thought. I loved to read and I really liked retelling the stories of my favorite authors, just a little better than they originally had the first time around. Laura Ingalls Wilder? Easy. Louisa May Alcott? Kid stuff. Lucy Maud Montgomery? So yesterday. Madeline L'Engle? Come on, challenge me.

And so I strapped in behind my Commodore 64, put keystroke to word-processing program and my first attempt at a science fiction, time-traveling tale of a girl and a octogenarian cowboy (Sam Jessup; yes, I still know the character's name!)  was born. This odd-ball pair was thrown together on a harrowing quest to help Texas fight for independence. My heroine (can't remember her name) "traveled magically" (also the title of this ubiquitous first novel) into a book where Sam was a character. Things ended well, just as they did in reality. Texas, last time I checked, is still part of the United States (although if you've ever lived there, you'll meet scores of folks who will tell you differently).

So I didn't get nominated for the National Book Award that year. So what? I didn't win the writing contest either (of course, they'll be sorry someday). I did get an A when I turned the story in for a grade in fifth-grade English class. Even the school principal, who liked the sparkly book cover I made with myriad glitter pens and sparkly stickers, seemed impressed.   

There were other contests and lots of other first chapters after that. A seventh-grade creative writing contest yielded a prize for a story about two best friends who visit a special tree each year to commemorate the death of another friend. That's some heavy stuff for a 12-year-old. I guess I was into a mixture of both Blume and Bronte back then. 

As high school hit, my fiction writing took a back seat as my career as a journalist began to unfold. My flirtation with the First Amendment is a story unto itself, so I'll leave the telling of that for another time. Needless to say, I didn't take up with my fiction career again until the second half of my senior year in college. There I sat in a creative writing class with people just like me, masquerading as normal folks with normal jobs and goals by day, but harboring a secret skill that was bursting to become their full-time passion. 

I think what shocked me the most was the non-traditional student - the 68-year-old grandmother - who sat next to me. She used her class assignments as an opportunity to expand her blossoming career as an erotic author. I just felt uncomfortable listening to someone that looked like she ought to be reading "Mother Goose" talk about sexual role playing in a dominatrix costume. Whip it, indeed.

The past 10 years has been a real dry spell - the worst since I dreamed up Sam 24 years ago. I like to think I've been on a journey of life experience -marriage, marathons, graduate school, baby, home ownership. Now I'm ready to take another crack at it with new characters, ideas and inspiration. Regardless, it seems as if my whole life has been hurtling toward this moment. I've been thinking about stories of my own for longer than I can remember, but I feel as if I can finally move them forward. 

 

I told my mother once, when I was really young, that I wished I had a typewriter affixed to the top of my head so that I could write whenever I wanted - in bed, in the shower, at the dinner table - and then it would be permanently on paper. I wouldn't forget a thing. 

Mom laughed. "All we'd hear is 'ding, ding, ding!' Because it would be going off all the time!"

Yes, but it would be super efficient and a serious time saver, as well as a truly interesting conversation piece.

Oh, wait... DING! Did you hear that? Gotta go. Just started Chapter 2! DING!