I am first and foremost a fantasy writer. I have always loved the magic and other worlds a good fantasy can take me too. The vivid and true-to-life characters and of course the all consuming battle of good against evil. My writing has always contained heavy amounts of romance as well. I didn’t think to combined the two genres until I started working with a friends on fantasy romance series.
My writing life started in high school where I took various creative writing classes, but I always found it difficult to complete a short story. I wouldn’t find out later that I am a novelist. The short stories I am able to write come from fleshing out world I have created or from a moment of snarky irritation. I work on trying to make a fully formed story in less words that it takes to write a novel, and have been able to cut my word counts down to about 26,000 words, that’s roughly 117 properly formatted pages.
When writing a novel, I tend to lose track of the world around me. My children know that Mommy is in writing mode. It may be making them slightly more independent than they would otherwise be, but I am content that they will learn one valuable lesson from living through this with me: Reach for your dreams, but they are only possible through hard work and determination. That is the attitude I hold when I write. I want to be not only a published writer, but a bestselling one as well. I will get there because I have the will and the determination to do it. With the support of my friends and family, I am slowly making that dream come true.
As a child I had difficulty reading. I maintained a second grade reading level until I reached the sixth grade when I discovered Jack London’s “The Call of The Wild”. I have always been enamored with wolves, and at the time, I had a St. Bernard named Brutes. Buck was the perfect hero for me. I didn’t like to read because the letters kept changing on me-and they still do. Aside from my Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder, I also suffer from dyslexia. It is a condition that not only affects how one sees the letters and there orientation on the page, but it also affects how one sees the word in their head. When I reach for my words, often times they are easy, and I have trouble with spelling them correctly. To this day I still have to look up words like miracle and exhausted. I have learned to use spell check and synonyms within Microsoft Word to help me with this disability.
When I first heard the other kids in my class were going to be reading stories about dogs, I was jealous that I wasn’t at the same reading level they were. I wouldn’t be getting the book to I could try so muddle my way through it or con someone into reading it to me. I found a copy of “Call of The Wild” in my mother’s vast collection of books, and I sat down with it and crunched my way through it. When the sentence didn’t make sense, I reworked the words until they did. While reading that story, I inadvertently taught myself how to read my way. I am sure many people have seen the scrambled paragraph where there was a university research project done that stated people read by looking that the word as a whole instead of sounding out each sound of the word, well, when reading those jumbled paragraphs, I can read them faster and with better cognition then a correctly written paragraph with proper selling.
When I discovered I could decode stories in my own way and still come away with the same understanding the other kids had, my world changed. The first book I picked up after that amazing discovery was The Belgariad by David and Leigh Eddings. We were on a family vacation to Nag’s Head, North Carolina that year, and it must have been fated, because it rained for nearly the entire week. I devoured the first book, and moved onto the second, and then the third, and by the end of the week, I had read five full length novels! It was the most amazing thing for me. The world opened up and now I had my own ideas of what kinds of stories I wanted to read on my own. The books gathering dust on my mother’s shelf were wiped clean and my reading journey began.
I took several creative writing classes in high school, and I wrote a few poems, and some short stories. Then I became involved with life and getting married and having children, but I always keep my love of reading, and dabbled in writing. Sometime in the late 1990’s a fully formed character popped into my head. He didn’t fit into any of standard worlds that had already been created for the fantasy genre, so I took up the arduous task of creating a world for him and Elburon was born. I worked on the character for a while, and life interfered. I set it aside. When I picked it up again, it was only to find out that I was pregnant with my first child. Again, I let life take over, though I did about a month seriously working on it before life interfered again. By then, I’d had my second child, and we were in the stages of buying a house.
Then, in December of 2005, I decided I would really start writing. I took a day and wrote thirty pages of the basic story I wanted to write. It had fantasy and romance in it. I showed it to a few people, and while the writing sucked, I did have a fabulous story idea. I let the story stew for a few weeks, and then, on January first, I started to write. I looked up writing communities on the internet and joined TheNextBigWriter.com in February of that year. I met a group of amazing people and I read their work and posted my writing. To my surprise most of the people on the site loved my story and my characters. It needs a boat load of work, but I knew I had found what I wanted to do. I had to write the world of Elburon and about all the wondrous people in it. Elburon was born, and there is no turning back from it.
