Who wants to be a writer?

Anybody can write. Really, it's what it took me most of my life to learn.

When I was a young girl and came to sample the great authors like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Buck, and so many others, I thought these people were the geniuses who came along once in a generation. To me they were superhuman beings who were born with the talent to compose great literature. Okay, maybe acclaimed writers like them have been blessed with special powers. On the other hand, there are hundreds of really good writers who tell compelling stories through their work in newspapers, books, magazines, e-zines, blogs, and every other form of the written and spoken word.

I was reminded by an artist friend of mine that painting demands a lot of hard work. Talent is an important element, of course, for any creative art; learning the craft and working at it is the rest of it. In my teenage years, I loved to play at writing poems and stories. Studying English and French in college allowed me to expand my understanding of language and literature, but I never imagined I might actually write something anyone else would want to read. Until, that is, I found myself able to leave a full-time career and work part-time. I decided I wanted to write. Whether anyone read it or not, writing became important to me. I dove right into that pool, never realizing how much I still had to learn. Now, more than six years later, I have somehow fooled Echelon Press into publishing my young adult novel, Snowstorm.

Snowstorm will come out in 2011, and in the intervening months I will be blogging about it. The journey thusfar has been a brain-stretching, eye-opening, head-pounding struggle, and I have loved every moment. In the next year I expect to chug slowly up the hills and slide wildly down the other side. I just hope I land on my feet.