I've not be a writer for as long as I can remember. I mean, I'm no Stephen King (in talent, prolificness, or insanity). I was not bed-ridden for the majority of my childhood left with nothing to do but copy comic books until my mother chastised me for stealing somebody else's work. Or so at least, that's how Stephen King claims he got his start in writing. But I have been spinning tall tales since my earliest memories, experimenting with just how far I could push the limits of what my parents would believe in the stories I told them about how I spent my days chasing after my older siblings. Sad to say, they believed most things...probably because they were all based in one underlying truth: My siblings detested having me around and did just about anything to prevent me from playing along with them (climbed trees that were too big for me to scale, smashed out my first tooth with our homemade teeter-totter, ran away screaming I was a pirate when my dad put my corrective eyepatch on, you name it...).
I've not been a writer long enough and consistently enough that my father has, on multiple occasions, used it as a means for punishment. Sometime during the summer between freshman and sophomore year in high school, my dad got it in his head that I should read Huckleberry Finn. It was, as he claimed, a classic every kid should read, and as my school had apparently dropped the ball and not assigned it up to that point and declared it would make up my summer reading (Incidentally, I would go on to read this book during my Junior year). The summer dragged on, and I did read parts of Huckleberry Finn, but I'm a girl and, accordingly, found it incredible dull. So, one day in August after he asked me what I thought of the book and I stared back at him blankly, my mouth working like a carp's while I tried coming up with some intellectual answer, he demanded I finish the book before the weekend (this was on Thursday) and write a report detailing the events and my analysis of the book. Oh, joy. So, I spent the entire next day reading, reading, reading, and reading while the beautiful sun peeped its head above the horizon, trailed across the hot, August sky, and sunk below the trees in the west. It was awful. Not the reading, necessarily, but feeling like I was chained to the couch and then later forced to vomit out yet another pointless book report.
And then again sometime later when he caught me in a lie...one of those moments where the truth is blindingly obvious but I stuck to my guns and claimed my unyielding innocence until he stalked off, red-faced from frustration and set about coming up with the perfect punishment. He came back smug in the knowledge that he'd created the perfect sentence for my crime. I was ordered to write a short story that would detail how lying negatively affects peoples' lives. So, in the fashion of an angry teenager who was endowed with just as much stubborn melodrama as her father, I wrote the most horrific story about a girl who'd lied to her parents and ended up dead because of it. I pulled from every horror story I'd ever read, any cheesy scary movie I'd ever seen and made my heroine spill her guts, quite literally, when an axe murderer came after her and her friends at a drive-in movie, an activity which was strictly forbidden, both for my heroine and for me. I dutifully handed the story over. And my father never said a word about it. Ever. It was quite possibly the only time in my life that I'd been able to render my father speechless. I considered it a success.
And so, I continued plodding on, wrote whenever genius struck, got an undergrad degree in English, and then a Masters, all the while dreaming of the day when I could make a living transforming the scrambled thoughts running wild in my mind to elegant words on a page.
