When the Page Turns

 

 

I’ve always loved a good story. Fantasy and adventure, with some action and drama, have always been my favorites.

When I was small, we had a bookshelf, and my mom would read to me before I knew how to read for myself. There were books by Dr. Seuss. Are You My Mother? was one of my favorites, along with The Rainbabies and Guess How Much I Love You. We also had a book of fairy tales that came with a cassette tape, so I could listen as the stories were read aloud.

I grew up watching movies like The Land Before Time, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, and FernGully. My favorite TV show was Gargoyles, and I always wanted to stay up late to watch it. For me, it was all about the stories. I loved how some Disney movies began with a book opening, as though we were about to step inside its pages.

When I learned to write and realized I could make my own stories, I was hooked. It was fun. It was something I genuinely enjoyed doing. I wrote about fairies and dragons. In kindergarten, we made pop-up books, and mine was about unicorns. I have no idea what happened to it.

Maybe it was lost in the house fire when I was around eight. Thankfully, no one was home at the time. The fire started with the woodstove in the garage, and afterward, we salvaged what we could. I think I still have that book of fairy tales.

I discovered self-publishing in my teens. When I was eighteen, my grandma paid to have one of my books published, The Adventures of Ceberis: Rise of the Guardians. We couldn’t afford marketing, but she knew someone at the Post-Journal, and an article was written about it.

It sold maybe forty copies in total, mostly to family. As a young woman with high expectations, I was pretty disappointed. My self-esteem was already low back then, so that certainly didn’t help.

I still wrote here and there. A couple of short stories. Nothing terribly ambitious. I started the second Ceberis book, but never finished it.

I know most people probably want to hear only the good, upbeat things, but life isn’t always good and upbeat. Everyone has things they struggle with. At some point, though I couldn’t say exactly when, I gave up writing entirely. There was an old filing cabinet full of things I’d written and worked on since I was young. I threw it all away.

Life took one turn, and then another. Now I’m thirty-four. I’ve been through some hard times and some good times along the way.

Just as I’m unsure of the exact moment I stopped writing, I can’t quite say what prompted me to start again. I started this business because I wanted a goal. A dream. I wanted to feel like I was moving toward something.

Then I started writing again, and now I can’t stop. I love it. I enjoy creating something, watching a story take shape and finding out where it will go. I learned about Amazon self-publishing, and now I’m an author again.

Maybe I always was, and had just forgotten for a time.

Now I’m back at the point where marketing has become necessary. I’ve tried so many things to get the word out. It isn’t easy.

But I won’t give up. I’m going to keep writing.

It’s part of what makes me, me.