Did I always want to be a writer? I don’t think I consciously made that decision, but writing was a constant in my life, mostly in the form of diaries and journals, with the occasional short story or poem or song lyrics. I don’t know what caused me to want to document my life in that way, but from the time I was about ten years old, that’s what I did. I wrote down the silly everyday things, wrote my first name with a boy’s last name behind it and drew lots of hearts when I had crushes, wrote for hours to get down all the details of a fun youth group event or trip, wrote my feelings – the happy, the sad, the hurt, the ups and downs, wrote about married life and the every day stuff of raising kids.
Along the way, journaling by hand became less and less, especially with the busyness of life, my wedding photography business, the kids, etc. and my documenting changed. I started scrapbooking a few years before Zach was born, and that became a different way to tell my stories. But I rarely made time to sit down and write about the everyday anymore. And I missed writing. It felt like I had all these experiences and memories trapped inside my head, all bottled up, and they needed to be let out.
So I began to type in a file on my computer. Because I’ve played the piano since I was eight, I have great hand/eye coordination and I can type much faster than I can handwrite, which meant getting a bunch of my stories out of my head and onto the page. I had done a little bit of this when we got our first desktop computer when stationed in Germany (Jake was in the Army in our early married years), so it was nice to get back to it.
And since I brought up that first desktop computer in Germany, I should mention that this was when I wrote my first novel. It was a little story about a girl at her youth group’s summer camp, and I never did anything with it. It was silly and romantic and based on some of my own camp experiences. But that was the first time I sat down and actually wrote a book. So I knew I had it in me.
Ten years later, my husband participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for the first time. The point of this month-long writing event that takes place every November is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It sounded like a fun challenge, and in 2008, I decided I would try. I was deep in wedding photography editing at the time after several fall weddings, and I had an idea for a story about a heartbroken wedding photographer who was always the photographer, never the bride. I went for it. And it was the most fun I ever had. I fell in love with the process and couldn’t wait to sit down to my computer every evening and see where my characters took me. And I did it! I completed the first draft of that novel in November 2008.
The following October, my husband asked if I was going to do NaNoWriMo again, and I said no. I didn’t have another idea, and I thought I had already met that goal so I didn’t care to do it again. But not long after, I was driving my kids to school and started thinking about this story idea I’d had years before about a girl with a friend nobody else could see but her. Was he real? Was he an imaginary friend? That sort of thing. I let my mind wander and thoughts and ideas formed until I was really excited about an updated version of this idea with a twisty ending, and I decided to go for it once again! And I finished my second NaNoWriMo novel first draft.
And then I did nothing. For four years. I didn’t write another novel during NaNoWriMo. And like my first summer camp story, those stories sat on my computer collecting virtual dust. 😉
Around that time, I had become burned out on wedding photography. The editing process took so much time away from my family when my kids were young, and I always felt like I was missing out. So I decided to step back from that, not really knowing what I was going to do next.
And then my ex-fiancé’s brother took his own life. When I look back now, I believe this was what woke me up and made me realize that life can change in an instant. It can blindside you. And it’s so short. I had been going through the motions of life for a while, not being fully present, just floating along. God gives us a set number of days, and I didn’t want to waste mine. And when I thought about what it was that brought me the most joy in recent years, writing my novels was the very clear answer.
So, I opened up the file for the “imaginary friend” story first (even though I wrote it second) because I truly believed God had given me that story and inspired me to write it, and I loved that little story so much. It was the one that brought tears to my eyes while writing it, so I decided to begin editing and see where it took me.
When I was happy with it, I let Jake, my mom, my mom-in-law, and my sister-in-law read it. My mom loved it, of course, but I thought, “Well, she’s my mom. She’s biased.” 🙂 And then my mother-in-law read it and she basically told me if I didn’t look into getting it published, she would kick my butt. LOL! My sister-in-law told me she was reading it on an airplane and she had to put it down because she started crying while seated next to a stranger. And then Jake read it. And he came downstairs after finishing it with tears in his eyes and told me it was really good and I needed to do something with it.
So I did. I began researching how to get a literary agent, etc. but the idea of receiving a whole bunch of rejections didn’t sound appealing. At all. So I looked into self-publishing, found Amazon’s self-publishing platform, and the rest is history.
That first book became The Truth About Drew. My wedding photographer book became Goodbye, Magnolia. And I have gone on to write and publish nine more novels with three more on the way as of the date of this post. And many more planned for the future.
This is my joy. Writing stories, sharing them with you, connecting with readers. And most importantly, using this gift God has given me.
If you’d like to learn more about the books I’ve written, you can find them all on my AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE HERE.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into the beginning of my writing life. 🙂