In all honesty, I became an author quite by accident. I didn’t take a single English class in college. I was a music major, after all, and I passed the AP English exam from high school, which counted as my college credit. Good enough for me. And for years after graduating, my focus was still music. Writing wasn’t even on my radar. I played the organ for church, directed a few choirs over the years, and had no intention of becoming an author. But then a student of the week project for my second-grade son gave me an idea for an A to Z poem that eventually became the book Our Faith From A to Z. Now, that’s the sort of book I can handle. There were specific parameters under which I had to operate—one word for each letter of the alphabet, each verse had to fit the meter of the poem, and I had to write an explanatory paragraph for each of the 26 words or concepts. I can do that. Fiction, on the other hand, is an entirely different sort of beast. You can pretty much go anywhere and do anything in your writing, so long as it’s interesting enough to capture people’s attention. It’s sort of daunting for someone like me who likes specific boundaries. I even told my best friend once, “I have no desire whatsoever to venture into fiction.” And that should have been the end of it. Because once I did try fiction, I did everything wrong. Continue reading “The Accidental Author”
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