So, way back in the spring of 2009 I
was feeding my toddler and staring out of our glass doors watching a bunch of
crows dive bombing something in the back alley. They were utterly silent which
is what caught my attention, it seemed so unusual. I wondered what it would be
like to be them, flying around the trees; no worries about a stalled career, or
gaining weight, or being a bare-minimum mom and less-than-bare-minimum spouse.
Not for them any worries about addictions, mis-managed money, or dilapidated transmissions.
I wanted to be a crow.
This is how my book was born.
It's almost three years later, and
I'm totally stoked because last night I finished writing chapter two.
When I was 8 years old, I read the
Little House on the Prairie series. It wasn't until after I'd finished it that
I learned that the author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, was dead. Long dead. I was
gobsmacked. HOW could a person who was DEAD make my laugh, make me cry? It's some kind of magic. Then I realized that I could write words
that people a hundred years from today could read! (Insert angels singing
here.) That was it, I was going to be a writer when I grew up. Unfortunately,
something happened along the way, or rather, nothing happened. I stopped
writing in my late teens. And I never picked it up again; until that afternoon
sitting at my dining table trying not to watch my son paint his highchair
tabletop with spaghetti sauce while digging chewed up noodles out of his
eyelashes.
What happened that derailed my
going-to-be-a-famous-writer train? Well....doesn't matter. It got derailed,
like, right off the tracks. So now, I'm on a whole new train,
it's an old steam engine (slow) with a lot of cars (can you say, 'baggage'?),
but I'm the engineer and I'm knocking down all the bloated cows and fallen
trees that get in my way.
Let my keystrokes be true, my
plotting be timely, and my voice be worth reading.
Cheers,
A.J.
