Aspirations

I was 8 years old when I remember first telling people that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

"Oh," many of them said, "You want to ride horses?"

"No," I responded, "I want to write books."

 That was when I first learned the importance of enunciation.

Within the next few years, I wrote a poem for a school assignment and my teacher posted it for the whole class to see.  Watching his reaction to my poem made me realize the potential that writing has for evoking emotion in others, and I realized that, through fiction (my first creative love), I could possibly cause strangers who I would never meet to feel something they hadn't been feeling a moment before, if even only for a brief time.  That far-reaching sense of connectedness had me hooked from then on.

I wrote my first novel in junior high school and passed it around each day for other students to read while I wrote.  Much to my amazement, some of the kids who normally didn't know I was alive wanted to read my novel!  I discovered I was able to reach people in a way that was different from my day-to-day interactions with them, and I loved it.

Life went on, responsibilities happened, and I put my writing aspirations on a back burner. 

In 2004, I discovered NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and decided to participate.  All those wonderful, deliciously intoxicating feelings were there again, and I remembered why I had always wanted to write: because it moves me, and it energizes me mentally and emotionally, and it makes me feel so alive.