I started writing when I was 12; I had always been somewhat creative, but up until that point, I mostly drew. My life was somewhat messed up at that time, and I had just discovered reading as an escape. I read “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and a little light went on in my brain that that was something I could do.
Like I imagine with most writers that start young, I was gung ho, positive that I would be published no later than my early twenties. At the time, actual paper magazines were still a thing, and the internet wasn’t, so for a while, that’s where I mostly aimed my efforts. Yes, I sent stuff out, and yes, I got rejections. A few were content-related, but no doubt, most of them were because of spelling and grammar issues. I moved around a lot as a kid and ultimately went to 12 schools before dropping out in the 11th grade. When you move around that often, especially within the state of Florida, you end up missing a lot of information.
Toward my later 20s most of my attention was focused on trying to have children, I still wrote, I was ALWAYS writing, but for a couple of years, I put aside the attempt to get my stuff out there and published. I’m old enough that the online options we have now didn’t exist then. Sadly I was never able to get pregnant.
When we turned 30, my husband and I moved back to Alaska. The first few years I slacked off, there was time, and I was still young. I wrote, and keep lists of different publishers, but I didn’t send anything out. I believe in part because my style was massively changing at the time.
Four years later, everything changed. I discovered that a couple of the discs in my spine were crushed, who knows why not like anything happened! I was at work and suddenly noticed that one of my big toes was numb, I left my job and went to see a doctor. Two weeks later, I was in surgery to trim up the squished up parts of my discs. From the moment I woke up until now, I’ve been in constant pain that even two more surgeries and tons of other treatments didn’t change.
Slowly I stopped writing, not only just not writing stuff down; it was as if the writing switch that had always been on had been turned off. The stories were just mostly not there, and I was too miserable to care all that much. For years I assumed it was the pain that had turned off that switch. I still wrote from time to time, but nothing at all like I had my whole life up until then.
Then something like six years later, I was lucky enough to have a doctor who was willing to let me get off the morphine I’d been on almost from the start. It wasn’t as extreme as the word “morphine” makes it sound, but it was morphine none the less. The why I was put on morphine is way too long a story to get into now, being in the pain management cycle is awful, and sadly not from the pain, it’s all politics.
That’s when I found out that it was the morphine that had turned off that switch. Once finally off it, the switch was not only thrown; it was as if the switch had been blown away. For a little while, the story that would become “Lost Kitty” came to me all at once in a flood while I scribbled it down in whatever order it occurred to me, then I had to shuffle the story together.
Finally, it’s time to get off my freaking ass and get back to it. I suppose none of you were asking why I’m not trying to get published until my 40s, but some part of me felt the need to explain.