Writing is one of those things that
will drive you crazy until you sit down and put words on a screen.
Writing strikes you at the most inconvenient times, in the most
inconvenient of places. Middle of the night asleep. Middle of
traffic on the freeway. Middle of explaining to your cat why she
can’t be on the keyboard. Elbows deep in a sink full of dirty dishes
and hot water. Or where I am now, editing the second book to make
sense of the notes my co-author left for me. Sydney plots, I
decorate. It’s a winning combination. She’s good at it.
So why write? I was a little girl from
a small town living in book world. I loved books. I read everything I
could get my hands on. A lot of what my church going mother wished I
wouldn’t read. My mother was a reader. Remember Reader’s Digests
Condensed books? Maybe not. It was the 1970s. My mother had them all
and I read them. She was fond of ‘the classics’. Then sorry I read
those as well. I gave my first oral book report in third grade on
Gone with the Wind by Margret
Mitchell. I read some of the saucier passages to my classmates. If my
memory is accurate, that prompted a parent-teacher conference. When I
discovered the horror and occult section at the local library, it was
love at first sight. Paranormal and supernatural genres would be my
loves forever.
I grew up to be a mom of three with a
full time job that was often tedious. Spinning tales is a nice
escape. It entertained my kids on car rides and kept me sane. People
who say sanity is overrated never considered how much insanity
getting a mortgage would create in their lives. It’s all about the
balance.
As much as the books, the author
biographies interested me. Some where boring, but some were just as
imaginative as the book. Why did they write? How did they fall into
it? Was in on purpose? The most common theme seemed to be “I wanted
to find books I like to read. So I wrote one.” It’s an empowering
statement.
So over the decades I wrote. I wrote
about characters I liked, I wrote about situations that interested
me. I even wrote a full length historical romance that survived the
many purges and several moves. It’s awful. I cringe when I see it
hiding at the bottom of my night stand. Sometimes the typewritten
pages get shifted when I move things around and I see it there,
rebuking me. I can’t appease it with salmon the way I can with the
cat when she shuns me.
By the way, whoever is my executor
must solemnly swear to either bury me with that monstrosity or burn
it in effigy when I’m dead.
Sydney and I even dabbled in fanfic
because we’re huge Wolverine and Nick Fury fans.
I write because I want to tell
stories. I want to make someone else fall in love with a character
that’s a little too imperfect. I want to make someone else look at
the sunsets the way I do, or the highway going past my office window.
(For the record, I often daydream of driving breakneck down that
highway and never looking back. Sorry, kids.) I want someone to put
down my story and think to themselves, “that freeway outside my
window is looking really good right now. Why don’t I write a book
that I want to read?”
That’s the pay off. We write one or several. Someone else decides to write one. And another one. Books for everyone! Kind of feels like Oprah, right? “And YOU get a book! And YOU get a book! EVERYBODY GETS A BOOK!”
-Dani
(P.S. Oprah, if you’re reading, we
would love to be on your book club recommendation list!)
