All of the Beautiful Horses

I was four-years-old when I fell in love with books. I have fond memories of my parents reading to me and me reading to them. I was sitting on the couch with a book the day my older brother and his friend started the field across the street on fire.  When I had to change schools in third grade, it was books that were my constant companions and friends.  By age eight I was reading the likes of Piers Anthony and Walter Farley.  By age nine I had already penned a series of  stories about horses. At age eleven I wrote my first novel, also a horse story, in pencil on lined notebook paper. By age 14 I’d read almost every book in the middle school library. By age seventeen I declared I would be a journalist and have my own column by the time I was thirty (which came true, incidentally) and by the time I was nineteen, I was in college for creative writing, penning more stories and articles and submitting to professional markets.

I’ve always loved writing because  I’ve always loved reading books. I love how they smell, how they feel, and above all, I love immersing myself in the worlds contained between their pages. When I was reading I was no longer that awkward, shy little girl who all the other children shunned. No, I was whisked away to a land of the author’s making where I could live vicariously through their characters. I learned quickly that if I wrote my own stories, I could live vicariously through the characters I created, too. In my own stories I could be the hero, the popular girl, the one who solved the mystery. I learned that I could write my own destiny in any way I wanted. While my heroes and heroines are no longer based on my alter egos (well, not primarily), and while I do lead an interesting non-writing life, I still enjoy escaping into the stories I write and sharing them with readers.

Through all my interests growing up, through all the stages of my life so far, that one constant has been my love of books and writing. I never considered any other career seriously.  Writing has been my life’s work. While I make no claims of being perfect, nor will I say that my writing is for everyone, I can tell you that in the pages of every one of my novels you’ll find a little piece of me and my enthusiasm for the story and the characters I create.

  About The FM Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour

Today’s post was inspired by the topic My Earliest Writing Dreams: Why I Became a Writer.  This month’s topic in the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour, an ongoing tour where you, the reader, travel around the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. We have all sorts of writers at all stages in their writing career, so there’s something for everyone to enjoy.

If you want to get to know nearly twenty other writers and read their thoughts on their earliest writing dreams, check out the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour.  I blog with this tour the 25th of every month.  Up next on the tour: Becky Pratt!