I've been a writer for as long as I can remember. I wrote plays for my cousins to perform (okay, no point in starting out with a lie. I wrote plays and forced my cousins to perform. I'm the oldest. It had some privileges.) During my teen years I wrote the obligatory angst-ridden poetry which my mother thankfully lost in some move or another after I left home.
In high school I worked on the newspaper and edited the yearbook. In nursing school I paid for my cigarettes by charging classmates to write their love letters or, my specialty, their "Dear John" letters. That may have been my favorite early writing gig.
Later, as my careers changed with the times and my restlessness, I wrote position papers for politicians, crafted legislative testimony and edited re-election brochures. Consulting clients read my reports, fact sheets and proposals. Members of the association I ran read my legislative reports and newsletters.
And while I was doing those things to support myself, I was collecting file folders of ideas for stories, novels, plays and who-knows-what-else. During those years, I'd use some of the bits of paper and mushed together cocktail napkins with indecipherable notes on them when my husband and I would go on ski trips. I'd write. He'd ski.
Segue to the present--in my office, a notebook full of short, published pieces, a play engagingly produced in an area grade school, two scripts being performed by Kids on the Block puppets and a novel about to be published.
And now a blog. Maybe, at last, a home for some of those ideas in the file folders. Or maybe just an excuse to go through the folders and recycle the paper.
We'll see.
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