A writer was born…well, started.
It was a Saturday afternoon when I gave up my illustrious, hours-long ambition of becoming a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader (after seeing the made for tv movie) and decided that pen …or rather, pencil and collegiate-lined paper were the path for me.
That day, I sat to write my very first story to be read aloud in Sunday school. I held the finished story in my fists as I ran down the hallway to my parents’ room to share my excitement. I finished it!
I was six.
From literally that moment on, I was a child obsessed. Writing was my calling in life, I simply knew it. I spent so much more time in my 7th grade English classes working on writing the Great American Teenage Novel, that my teacher finally just gave up and graded me on the curve. I finished my first two novels–150 legal size pages, handwritten, in 7th grade and thought I was off to the races.
The designer was born…
(Translation: Pay a lot of money to go to school, get a degree and go beg for work.)
I took a very long-winded detour on my path to being The Greatest Novelist Ever. (My exact dream at age 8, I believe. Of course, then, the greatest novelist I knew was Dr. Seuss and…well, he’s still pretty great.)
That detour dropped me into the career of marketing and design, for which I happily focused on for quite a few years. Little did I know how useful it would prove when I decided to pick up my keyboard (having graduated from pencil) and started writing again. Now I have the weight of a marketing career behind me, so whenever that career as The Greatest Novelist Ever (my dream in…well, my dreams) kicks into gear, I have a multitude of experiences to help me navigate those waters. And I’m more than happy to share them, as well. My design company is Will Design For Chocolate and here on this site, you’ll find a variety of articles, posts and marketing tidbits to help you navigate your waters without drowning.
The bluebird and the Raven.
I began writing historical romance – my favorite author was Judith McNaught, so I thought I should write what she did. But over time, I realized that her voice was hers and mine was distinctly mine. (The wonder of us writers.)
My voice, my style I suppose, is two sides of a coin — the bluebird and the raven. My husband has long said that bluebirds dance and sing about my head — this is his way of saying I have quite the Disney-esque attitude about me. And yes, I even got birds to eat from my hand on a trip to Maui once. But then, we had a conversation one day with some friends — about the best way to kill someone and hide a body. They all came up with sure-fire plots to land them in jail. And after I was finished coming up with my plot (involving chopping body parts), I suddenly realized the room had gotten very quiet.
It wasn’t long after that I realized while I have a big drive to always find a silver-lining in life, it would likely be as I drive under the clouds looking for a place to hide the body in the trunk. It’s an odd mix, I know — the positive meets the “Oh My God, what did she just do?” But it’s also a heck of a lot of fun to write.
My first published novel was SOMETHING ABOUT HER, a Regency-set historical published by The Wild Rose Press that was billed as “fairy tale” by some reviewers. Which was great, because it was exactly what I aimed for. (Back to the Judith McNaught concept.) But going forward, you’ll find there’s more darkness to my stories. Love and light only become so important when there is darkness and death. We only appreciate the good because we have lived through the bad. And underneath every decision we make, every wrong choice, there is a reason. I realized that I’d long been fascinated by why people do the crazy and awful things they do. Just ask the folks in my college speech and debate class, who sat through my topics for discussion on teenage murderers, the death penalty and serial killers, respectively. (Good thing I turned out to be an author.)
The point of it all — I have learned, finally, to write what fascinates me. And while fairy tales are fun, what has always pulled me in is the more human side of who we are, what facades we hide behind and what happens when we let our true selves come out. I hope you’ll see that in my books ahead.
