I wanted to be an author since the fourth grade.  We did an assignment for class where we wrote a prompted story, and my teacher encouraged me.  I was already an avid reader who spent a lot of time at my local library.  My mom made sure we did summer reading club every year.  You’d be surprised what a kid in the 80s would do for a wooden token for a DQ Dilly Bar and a free Babysitter’s Club book.  Or maybe you wouldn’t.

My teacher encouraged me to think about the books I read and liked.  Somebody had to write those books.  Maybe I could write books somebody else would check out of the library, too.  I connected with Ramona Quimby, from Beverly Clear’s Henry and Beezus story world.  As a kid who was five years younger than my brother, I related to a kid who was in that awkward place, tagging along and talking way too much.  I vaguely remember having a fight with my brother, and turning around and writing a story about The City of Seven Sisters.  I wish I still had that original manuscript.  It probably would have said a lot about the writer I would become.

My bother did have a lot to do with me developing creatively, through games and activities.  My family got a home movie camera, and my brother and I loosely plotted out films.  I can remember cutting up paper bags to make costumes.  One time I was a bird.

I continued writing bits and short stories until high school, where I completed and self-published two poetry chapbooks.  They must have had some merit – as I wound up in the principal’s office, accused of having plagiarized them.  This may also have had something to do with the fact that I was selling them on campus for a quarter a pop.  It was the 90s.  We were wearing flannel and Doc Martins unironically.  I was going through a rebellious phase.  So I took slighted twisted pride in the whole incident.

I was taking journalism, and working on both the high school newspaper and the yearbook.  So of course, I decided to write a novel – a very poorly plotted novel about a bunch of kids doing journalism class who were attempting to solve a murder.  But I was proud of it at the time. I found out about an adult-level writing group just a town over, and convinced my parents to drive me to it.  The Golden Triangle Writer’s Guild met at the Holiday Inn in Beaumont, Texas.  I listened to people talk about their writing, and I started submitting my own.  There was a conference and a contest every year, and it wasn’t long after I graduated high school that I started placing in the contests.  I even got a short story published.  And I met some amazing industry contacts – including an editor who would remember me twenty years later as that kid with promise whose work she judged.

I went to college and majored in English, where I took creative writing courses.  I got praise and good grades on my work, but when I submitted that same work, it was rejected.  It wasn’t until much later that I realized I had been relying on sheer talent without understanding the mechanics of story.  People would like my query and my voice, and request pages, then the whole thing.  Then they would send it back almost immediately.

I went to library school, and took classes in youth services and in storytelling.  I did a huge project on oral history, and how people related to their time period.  I spent time interviewing my family.  I know this had an impact on how I later related to my characters, and their roles in what they were doing.

I participated in a number of writers groups and critique groups.  I still wasn’t having success on the publishing front, so once I started working in libraries, I focused on founding writers’ groups and activities, helping others find their creativity.  I stopped submitting my own work, after I wound up with trunk novel after trunk novel.

Eventually, I stopped writing altogether.  It was probably the bleakest time in my life.  I was experiencing career burnout at the same time as some social issues.  And I didn’t realize it at the time, but writing was what I had been using to sort my thoughts and cope with some decidedly unfair decisions.  It was something I could control when everything else was out of control.  And I took it away from myself, because I decided if writing wasn’t making me money, then I couldn’t justify spending such large amounts of time on it.

Years passed.  Tragedies happened.  Eventually, I realized I needed to get my mojo back.  And I started writing again.  And, because I felt the need to justify it, I started submitting again.  My husband was hugely supportive of my endeavors.  He had always read my writing before, but I think he realized I needed something to pull myself back up.

I had the opportunity to do some public speaking, and I started lecturing about herb gardens, tea and garden railroading on board cruise ships.  I realized that everyone had some form of SWAG to make money on the ships, and that was when Golden Tip Press was born.  (Golden tip denotes one of he highest grades of tea.)  Jake and I printed and hand cut A Walk Through Dandylyon’s Garden, a book with craft ideas, garden help and more relating to herbs.  We hand spiral bound it.  We became more active with the local herb society, and, to go along with presentations for that group, created You Can Can With Herbs and There are Herbs in my Chocolate.  We had the audacity to put both of those up on Amazon, though we knew nothing about marketing or cover design.  I also had a column at the time with Dave’s garden.  It felt like I was building something.

It was at that point that I had an agent I had submitted to before sit me down and tell me that I always submitted work to her two drafts too soon.  And that my story structure was all over the place.  It was tough love that I needed to hear.  Because of that, I started to study fiction writing systematically.

It was eye opening, pulling it apart technique by technique.  I started teaching for UT Arlington Continuing Ed.  My first few classes were cooking classes.  I did a cooking for one class and got scared after several students came close to cutting their fingers off.  One day, my supervisor asked if I knew anyone interested in teaching creative writing.  Of course, I volunteered.  Those first few years of pulling apart student manuscripts taught me more about writing than anything I have done before or since.

And I had always heard in the writers groups not to get stuck on a project.  Send it out and think about the next thing.  But I learned that lesson too soon, and I had never put in the work to revise and rework and repolish a manuscript until the structure was clean and the characters sang.  I did that with Free Chocolate, which had started out as a NaNoWriMo project.  The original 50K novella was very different from what the 140K novel eventually became.

I decided, since I was writing Sci-Fi, that I wanted to go to one of the big conferences, where I could pitch to the big sci-fi agents.  I pitched and never heard back.  But I’m always a talker, and I struck up a conversation with another writer I had met earlier in the conference weekend.  She asked if I was pitching, and when I said yes, she had me pitch in front of everyone standing there in the hallway.  One of the folks was the guy from Angry Robot would eventually pick up Free Chocolate.

Of course, that’s not the book I pitched.  I had been told that Free Chocolate was too weird, quirky and over the top.  I pitched a time travel piece that I was really attached to.  Maybe it was because those characters had gotten me through hard times.  Maybe because the protagonist represented coming back from absolute zero to save the world.  Mike rejected that piece but asked if I had anything else.  So I sent Free Chocolate, figuring it couldn’t hurt.  It took a long time.  But when he finally got back to me, he said it was a unanimous choice for Angry Robot.  And I was able to take that offer and find an agent.  I chose someone else I had met at that same writing event.

I learned a lot about chocolate from writing and marketing the Chocoverse books.  So when the trilogy was complete and I was looking for a new project, I decided to write a cozy mystery series with a craft chocolate maker sleuth.  It came close with several traditional publishing houses, but eventually  became a passion project.  I’m eight books into the series, and more in love with these characters than ever.

I think the fact that my writing journey hasn’t been smooth – that I had fourteen – count ‘em 14 trunk novels before Angry Robot published my debut – gives me empathy when dealing with clients and students.  I’ve been where a lot of them are now, with a lot of talent that needs guidance to get somewhere productive.  And I’ve got the patience to get them there.  Several of my students have gone on to publish their books.  And many more have to tools to do so, once they finish and polish their projects.  But finishing your work — that’s a lecture for another day.