Writing has been a part of my life since I was a child.  I remember a never-ending story about Glenda the Fish and all her underwater adventures that I wrote somewhere around the age of seven.  It seems that stories have always flowed from my brain to my fingers in some form or another.

I majored in zoology in college.  As interested as I was in writing, it was animal behavior that captured my serious attention.  After college, unable to find a job as a zoologist, I worked as a projects coordinator for an agricultural research firm for five years.

It was during this time that I met a man while on my daily walk to exercise my dog…a wonderful man who became my husband in 1990.  It’s been eighteen years now, and he is truly the stuff dreams are made of.  I love him more than ever.

The year we were married is the same year I wrote my first book.  It’s funny how that first book came about.

There was a Harlequin Romance that I had read way back in high school.  I absolutely loved that book – I thought it was the epitome of everything romantic – and I wanted to own a copy of it.  Oddly, I did not remember the title or author, but I did remember what the cover looked like (go figure).  Every time I found a used bookstore, I would look through the romance section, searching, searching, searching.

And one day I found it!  There it was, my favorite romance novel from when I was in high school!  Ecstatic, I took it home and devoured it.

Well, you guessed it.  It was awful.  Terrible.  Some of the worst writing I’d ever read.  And to think I’d spent years looking for this stupid book!  I mean, c’mon…even I could write better than that…!

I can hear you laughing because, as with so many other writers, that’s how it all began.  I decided to give romance writing a shot.

I discovered that writing romance wasn’t as easy as it looked.  On and off for the next fifteen years, I wrote books.  I wrote and wrote and wrote.  And I got rejection after rejection after rejection.

Well, life went on.  We left the city and moved to semi-rural Oregon.  My husband started his own woodcraft business.  I went to grad school.  After graduating, I worked seasonally as a field biologist.  When babies started coming, I switched to working nights (surveying owls, for anyone who wonders what a field biologist does at night) so we could avoid daycare.  I am not a night person, so those were tough years.

But I kept writing.  I distinctly remember my newborn second daughter tucked against my chest in a sling, sound asleep….while I sat at the computer and wrote.

Our home business improved enough to allow me to stop working outside the home and share in the woodworking production.  I kept writing, I kept submitting, but it was secondary to all the other things a young married couple deals with – scratching to make a living, paying bills, dealing with a mortgage, learning how to handle livestock (we lived on four acres and had a cow and chickens), growing a garden, and raising toddlers.

I got an agent, an exceptionally awful agent, who taught me to research agents carefully before signing up.  I truly think this agent hampered my growth for the three-year period during which she, ahem, “represented” me.  But I kept on writing.  And learning.

You see, during this long interim of writing but not publishing, I was figuring out the craft of fiction.  I had a laundry list of technical and stylistic problems that were pointed out to me by friends, critique partners, and editors; but either I could not or did not understand what they meant.  Excessive adverb use, internal and external conflict, goal/motivation/conflict, story arc, show-don’t-tell, dialogue, mannerisms, backstory dump, advancing the plot, point of view shifts…the list went on and on.

Apparently I’m a slow learner because it took a long time to fix these problems, but one by one I finally understood what people had been telling me.  I also read something profound by Jack Bickham in his book The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes: “If you don’t know what you don’t know, then there’s no way for you to hear advice designed to remedy the problem.” [Emphasis mine.]

In other words, if I didn’t understand what an editor meant when she said that my point-of-view shifts were all over the place, how on earth could I fix it?  I began to recognize the errors in my own writing.  That was the breakthrough I needed to learn – truly learn – how to write fiction.

And life went on.  The babies grew and became children.  We started homeschooling.  Our woodworking business continued to support us.  We sold our home in Oregon and bought a house on forty acres in north Idaho.  We acquired more livestock.

I started getting published in magazines (writing credits, you know).  I became more confident in my abilities.  I became active in my RWA chapter.

And finally, finally, my fiction got published.  I will always be grateful to The Wild Rose Press for recognizing the unrecognized writer within me, just waiting to burst free and bloom.

In less than a year, I had four books accepted for publication, with more poised and waiting to go.  After all, by this point I had seventeen years’ worth of manuscripts piled up, some better than others, that I could revise and submit.

I suppose the moral of this story is to never, ever give up your dream of writing.  It takes determination, a thick hide, no ego, and a willingness to learn.

But if I can do it, so can you.

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