Unlike my fellow writers I was not a writer as a child, nor an avid reader. My childhood was consumed in imagination.  It was my safety net from the reality of not being an academic.

School was desperately hard for me.  My teachers found it far easier to send me out in the hall or to send me to the corner rather than to try to help me put the reading puzzle together.

My parents threw up their hands in trying to make me understand phonics and to this day spelling continues to elude me. (Thank God for spell check.)

So why become a writer?  It certainly isn’t a career for the sensitive soul—there is all that rejection, and waiting….for more rejection.

You have to have the patience of a snail crawling from one side of the road to the other and the skin of a dragon (not easily pierced by rejection) to handle this job. If someone asked me to describe myself as a dog, I would be a Golden Retriever: Loving, a pleaser, sensitive, a kissaholic, did I say a pleaser?

Any other career would be easier on my sensitive heart. So why indeed?

Because I can’t help myself.  My imagination is never quiet–neither am I. (Another one of my down falls as a child) It is constantly churning. Wherever I go, whatever I am doing my mind is wondering, questioning, seeing things that most people never notice.  Those things roll around, and around and the next thing I know I am at my computer typing as fast as I can trying to keep up with my mind.

How did I manage? Being a slow learner and all? I learned the writing rules—slowly. And I continue to educate myself through conferences, workshops, books, mentors, and SCBWI.

What about the rejection? It still kills me but like a Golden retriever I go back, trusting someone along the way will love my work. And I lick my wounds with my writing community that understands the sting of rejection. Their encouragement is like a band-aid.

What about the waiting? I’ve learned to send a manuscript off and get started on something else. The distraction helps the months go by.

So, here I am with all these brainy people, writing, and selling books that will be read by little people.  Who’d have thought this is where I’d be when I grew up?