Introduction

A crazy thought popped into my head the other day, and I tried desperately to put it back. But thinking is like Pandora's box. The creatures let loose into the world by your brain will never be put back safely and neatly into the the recesses of your memory. They can't be un-thought.

What was this dangerous, insidious thought? Here I was, minding my own business, babysitting my kid at the public library when I thought, I should write a book! A book. The madness of it. I shudder to recall this point in my life because it marks a descent into a world I can not turn back from, a world filled with grief and struggle.

At first, it was a hobby. I did it intermittently, sporadically. Then I thought, I should improve my writing skills. So I took a writing class, and I wrote a little bit more: a handful of pages here, a couple more pages later that week, and a few more next month. Before I knew it, my job, which was perfectly reasonable before, was no longer any fun. I wanted to write. I wanted to be a writer.

What stuns me even now is the rapidity of the transformation. No more than six months between the initial thought and the cataclysmic upheaval of my life. Before that fateful moment in the public library with my daughter, I had often sighed with relief that I wasn't a writer. Who would want to do something so hard, so risky? Not me, I was sure.

Now here I am on the cusp of leaving my career behind, of diving into uncertainty without any assurance that I will be OK, in fact, with the nagging feeling that I will never be OK again.

This is my blog. It is about how I am trying to be a writer. I started it because the Internet says that is what writers do and I am grasping for straws.