WE ALL HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE

"My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts." Joan Didion

I caught the writing bug in church.  I'm not saying that it was a religious experience or some life-changing touch from the hand of God.  It was more like desperately grasping at the sides of a lifeboat so that I did not perish from complete and utter boredom.  Usually during the first few droning sentences from the pulpit, I would mentally slip away and begin to concoct wild stories in my mind.  Stories which, of course, cast me as the brave heroine facing peril at every turn.  I would become so lost in these daydreams, that it was difficult to snap to attention when it came time to stand and sing the first and last stanzas of the hymn of invitation -usually Just As I Am.

Besotted with the joy of inspiration, I spent the week, feverishly writing the story in one of those little spiral pocket notebooks, filling the pages with my number two pencil and anticipating rave reviews from my peers.  Of course, I truly had a captive audience because the next Sunday, I would pass the notebook down the pew to my friends who gratefully consumed each word.  My story became their lifeboat that safely took them through the monotony of the sermon to the closing hymn. 

While they were reading my words, I was fantasizing about become famous...about graciously receiving their words of praise with an appropriate amount of humility.  The response was never quite what I expected.  There was usually the politely mumbled, "That was good" balanced by "That was really stupid."  Unreasonable critics exist even in childhood. But, in spite of the mixed reviews, I continued to produce these spiral notebook wonders for several months, until my mother discovered that I was not actually paying attention in church (Who knew that was required?) and put an end to them.  I was hoping that my faithful readers would be heartbroken, but instead they simply substituted games of hangman and tic-tac-toe.  How easily I was replaced.

So now - a bajillion years later - I am here putting words on paper, weaving stories that I hope will interest and entertain the readers.  Gone are the fantasies of fame and fortune but sometimes, when I finish a chapter or a scene, I catch a few bars of Just As I Am floating around in my head.