And Hopefully I Will

This thing called writing has consumed me. I think about it all the time and when I am not writing I am trying to decide what path to take with this fine craft. When I was a little girl, I wrote stories all the time. I would go to my mother's office at the Chamber of Commerce and sit at the extra desk in front of a type writer and pretend I was a famous author and I would write outlandish stories about make-believe lands and people with strange names.
In college I took a children's literature course during which one of our assignments was to write a spontaneous melodrama that would be performed by everyone in class. I found my file of stories I had written way back then, pulled one out, tweaked it just a bit and turned it in. My professor and classmates thought it was genius and when I told them I wrote it when I was eight, they didn't believe me. How funny is that? But really, aren't the best stories in all of your life the ones you read as a child? My mama used to read "Goodnight Moon" to me, and my third grade teacher read "Where the Red Fern Grows" to the class and I would lose myself in the wonder of other worlds that someone simply made up. I swore to myself then that I would one day write stories that would make childhood magical for another generation of kids. And hopefully I will.