About Me
I wrote my first book at the age of seven. About flowers, or "flawrs," it
included many lovely illustrations, including a painfully elongated, but happy,
brown horse with a mouthful of daisies. Having just finished the project on the
way to school, the smell of Crayon still fresh on my hands, I walked into the
classroom beaming and handed the professionally stapled book to my teacher who
said, "Thanks, now go sit down."
I never saw the book again.
I felt so sorry for myself I somehow missed the incident's prophetic message, that writing is a tough biz, and so continued to write with abandon. Long, rhyming poems about diamonds, history essays stocked with $50 words, a truly terrible high school graduation speech. Somewhere along the way my sister gave me a journal for my birthday, upon the painful re-reading of which I concluded that 1) I had nothing interesting to say, and 2) I had to write anyway. In fact, writing, the cheapest form of therapy available, is probably the reason I've never fallen into deep despair, though having a wonderful family, an excellent body chemistry and a somewhat flexible personality doesn't hurt.
In an attempt to turn a passion into a trade, I attended journalism school where I wrote about the return of a lost wallet, interviewed Stephen Stills and witnessed a cow butchered at the campus slaughterhouse, among other things. The more people I interviewed, such as politicians, religious extremists, medical professionals, the more I began to understand the different worlds in which people lived.
Required to accurately quote people (a lofty goal for a college student with no prior experience) I began to develop an ear for dialog, as in the actual structure of what people say rather than a sanitized version that complies to the rules of grammar. I also picked up more detail and ideas than I could ever use in a single article or broadcast script, and so began squirreling away scraps of dialog, images and situations. After working as a stringer for $25 a story for a year in the St. Louis area, I moved on to part-time work at a daily paper in Wisconsin where I actually wrote about a couple who married their dogs. No doubt a hard act to follow, I moved on to a suburban Chicago weekly before freelancing for the Chicago Tribune. Ice fishing tournaments, Imelda Marcos' shoes, enthralling tell-alls about what kind of nails to use for which home projects, the ideas, images and dialog began to rack up. Having written and wisely discarded my first novel, I sold my first piece of fiction, a goofy children's poem, in June of 1995 and cherished my two free copies. After that, whenever I got something published, I thought, It's got to get easier. But it doesn't. I don't whine anymore, however. Instead I write. And write. And write. Not because fame and fortune await, but because I would be a joyless human being if I didn't.
"Find what you love to do and do it."
Many Smart People