In the beginning...

My first novel was about a Native American baby girl who was kidnapped by an English couple.  The couple took the baby back to London where they never told her the truth about her birth family.  Meanwhile the girl, who had long dark hair and dark eyes, never suspected she was any different than her pale blond haired parents until she uncovers some secret artifacts hidden away in the attic.  She goes on a bit of an adventure, traveling back to the land once owned by her ancestors and discovers the truth.  In the end, she forgives her English parents and meets her Native American family, whom she decides to visit during the summers.

I was in third grade when I wrote this suspensful thriller.

While the story lacked...well, pretty much everything...I loved writing it.  In fact, I loved writing anything.  I know it sounds kinda creepy, but there has always been a natural attraction between me and a crisp fresh piece of notebook paper.  The way a pencil glides on the page, moving back and forth, crafting lines into letters, letters into words....well, you get the picture.  I'm was, and still am, a bit obsessed with writing which would be perfect if my profession was an author. My obsession would have been completely normal if I had majored in....oh, I don't know....creative writing where I probably would have met other people equally obsessed with the faint sound a charcoal pencil makes as it rubs on it's lose leaf counterpart.  However, I took a different path.

I majored in Biomedical Engineering.  Could I have gotten any further away from writing??  But I won't say that I regret my decision.  At the time, I wanted a firm career in a growing industry.  I thought having job stability would make me happy, but as anyone with a passion knows....if you take away the thing that makes you "you", you simply won't be happy.


So the summer before my senior year of college, I got back into writing while accepting that I'd never get any college training in the subject.  Instead, I decided to immerse myself in books then take a stab at writing one myself.  Enter my brief but wildly awesome obsession :  romance novels. 

Ok, ok, so I wasn't reading Faulkner or writing the next great American novel, but man.....I loved reading and writing romance.  I spent the entire summer before my senior year sequestered in my room, typing on my computer, only coming out to go to my job at the tissue engineering lab.  It.  Was.  Awesome.  I mean, the experience was awesome.  The book was terrible.  I'll have to post some snips from it so you can see how truly terribly it came together.

But the passion for writing came back with such overwhelming abundance, that I knew I could no longer deny what it is I really wanted to do with my life.

So let me skip ahead a whole bunch of years.  I'm married to an amazing hunk of a man.  We have the coolest little dude son ever.  We homeschool him which is far more difficult than I anticipated.  And we're Christians.  I mention that last bit only so you can understand why I changed my genre from romance to Christian romance, which is pg rated instead of X (although in defense of romance novels, some are a hard pg-13 while others are X.  It really depends on the writer.)  Oh, and I've been writing tons!  Like, tons and tons!

Now...it's time to get serious.  This includes writing something worthy of others actually reading, plus getting published.  And because I'm a wanna be writer, I thought it only fitting to blog about my path to publication every step of the way.

So I'm at the beginning.  I have some short stories, plus some longer novelish type stories, but nothing to submit to an agent.  Plus, before I even get to that step, I need to work on a ton of "pre-publishing" things that I'll go into over the coming blogs.  And then...of course...there's the emotional side to all of this.  I need to actually work up the courage to try and turn my dream into my life which is pretty scary, especially since my life is pretty busy.

But we'll get to all that.  First thing first.  A published author told me that a typical romance novel runs somewhere around 80,000 - 100,000 words.  The longest "novel" I have right now is just over 30,000 words.  So I have some writing to do while doing a bunch of other "pre-publishing" things.  But I'm ready and pumped!!...and let's face it, a little scared....but mostly pumped!! 

Time to get to work!