The Journey

I already have a post that talks a little bit about why I write but as with most things in life, writing for me is multi-faceted. So amuse me for a minute while elaborate on the journey:


I have an insatiable love of people

I want to know everything about them and their lives

And a natural outcropping of this is a love of stories

(Apparently these people don’t have to be real ;)

I LOVE stories

Streaming out of my love of stories and people comes my love of the theater

I studied theater for years learning how to tell stories, tell about the lives of people, and help audiences see the world through the eyes of another.

I worked my empathy muscles till it hurt

I had incredible inner dialogue going on

I learned to make brave, bold, interesting choices for my characters

And I loved it

But theater takes a lot of hours away from my children and I could only sacrifice so much of that

I also LOVE film and television

I studied film in school as another way to tell these stories of people

I really enjoyed studying it but filmmaking is expensive (and as it turned out, not a natural talent)

My husband studied English in college and is a published author (I think he would dismiss this because he only has ONE book published. He’s so silly.)

So maybe writing was the way to tell the stories in my heart

But, I already knew that I wasn’t a writer (My writing was shot down really hard and fast a couple of times and I have been a hesitant writer ever since)

But unlike filmmaking, writing is cheap. I’m not talking about publishing; I’m talking about writing.

Learning the craft is taking a while but I can do it at home with my children, who are still young

And I have lots of stories to write (even if only my children read them)

All of them about people

Those wonderful, wonderful people.

Thanks Kayeleen for the excuse to write a little bit more about me. To see why other authors write, see the list HERE.

Wait a minute. Hold the phone. You write?

I know some of my friends and family are asking themselves right now, 'How come I never knew Shelly was a writer?' And some of you are saying, 'Oh man, if I could just get Shelly to stop talking about her stories.' And some of you are saying, 'Oh man, how do you get Shelly to stop talking?' (There are actually more of you out there than you might have known- can I suggest a support group?)

For those who want to know a little more about my secret life as a writer, here goes:

I've been writing since I was 5 years old. It was really hard for me at first. Sometimes my letters were backwards. Sometimes I got that callous on my middle finger from my pencil. And sometimes, just sometimes, I wrote a word all by myself with no help. Skip to college and I stopped getting that pencil callous (thanks to computers), I spelled almost everything correctly (thanks to spell check), and nearly everything I wrote was research papers (thanks to my degree in history.) When I left college I stopped writing (ha-ha-ha, writing is like talking- I NEVER STOP!)

But I didn't dip my hand into writing fiction for a long time. I don't know about you guys but I have things in my life, I'm pretty sure I'm not very good at. In that category fell poetry, songwriting, and storytelling.

But one day, I was melancholy, missing my nieces and nephew who lived on the other side of the country. In my funk I had a brush with inspiration. I could write them a story with their names in it. Then they would know that I love them and maybe it would make me miss them less.

And that's how I got the bug.

If any of you want a taste of what I write, I'd be honored to send you a short story for your perusal.

In the meanwhile thank you for your support

Why I have an Author Blog...

Alright, I have known I should be doing this for a while now. It's been poking at me and pestering me for the past month. Yesterday a friend said she would cyberstalk my empty blog waiting for me to post. But still, nothing.  I even told myself this morning, that I should start it next Monday (Why Monday? All I knew was that Monday wasn't today.)

Then today on writerunboxed I saw this article on having an author blog.
Today!
It's like the universe was hitting me on the head.
I get it.
I get it.
I get it.

So here I am.

I highly recommend reading the article on writerunboxed as it applies to marketing social media and very few of us can consider ourselves exempt from that nowadays. It talks about the idea that having a twitter and a facebook is not enough. You control your material better on blogs. That is a universal idea.