What I Want to be When I Grow Up

I was checking out a post on one of my favoritest blogs, Wyndsong Writes, and found this awesome little tidbit of a jewel. It seems that she was getting in on a little game being played at Bloggy Moms called the Blog Challenge. Each month, Bloggy Moms puts on a month-long challenge for everyone to leave a post on their site, then they need to head over and leave a comment as to where the post can be found, then tweet about the post as well.

This month's challenge is about what we wanted to be when we grew up.

(From the site)---"July's Blog Challenge: {Childhood Ambitions}
Write a blog post about your childhood dreams, wishes & ambitions. What did you dream of becoming? What did you sincerely think you would do with your life? Where are you know along that road? How do you feel about where you are?"

That was a no-brainer for me. For as long as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a storyteller. Even before I could write, I was telling stories about my invisible friends and what we were doing, and what we were going to do. I even tried to get my grandmother to set an extra plate at the dinner table for my "friends". She always said that if they were invisible to us, then they could eat off of invisible plates too.

I wrote my first official story at the age of about 10. We had an assignment in school where we had to invent something made up from our name. At that time, my last name was Wickwire so I invented a burglar alarm made from candle wick and barbed wire. I got an A on that assignment, and I knew that being a writer was the only thing I wanted to do.

In high school, I wrote poetry. Yep, all that sticky-sweet, mushy, give-me-a-cavity poetry about boys and love and heart ache. I sucked, but I had passion. Every boy I dated had his very own poem. Every teen heart-throb had one of his own too. I wrote poems in anger, in pain, in love, and in fear. There were times it was my only release from life and it's probably a good thing I had it to vent through.

When I got married, I figured my wanna-be-a writing career was over. There was no time for college as babies came right after the wedding. But then came something else. My hubby bought me an old, crusty typewriter. It was a manual one, with crooked keys and the letter "l" and the number "1" were the same key. But I was more than happy. The hubby worked graveyards and the baby didn't sleep much at night, so my evenings were spend plunking away on that old typewriter.

I sent out a few short stories and poems to different publishers around the country, and even got a couple of my poems published. But for the most part, I was writing just for the joy of writing. In 1997, the hubby got us our first computer. It was an old one and we were told not to bother even trying to get it online, but you don't tell my hubby that he can't do something. Within a month of getting that thing, the hubby had it online. That's when my writing career really took off.

I began searching for anything and everything I could on getting published. I figured that since I had my hands one the gateway to the Information Superhighway, I was going to learn everything I possibly could. I may not have had the chance to go to college, but that didn't mean I couldn't sit down and teach myself.

It's been 13 years since that first computer and I can honestly say that I am a professional writer. I'm still telling my stories, I still write poetry, and I still hang out with my invisible friends. My childhood dream became a reality.