The First Time

I'm feeling awkward. I'm not entirely sure where to put my hands. What happens if I press there? Is that good? I wish I knew how to gauge how I'm coming across. Too eager? Too shy? I'm pretty sure it's clear I have no idea what I'm doing.

What I'm trying to say is that it's my first time blogging. I don't even know if anyone's ever going to read this. I would like to think so. Otherwise, I'm just shouting into an empty room... and that's embarrassing. Actually, it's worse than embarrassing. No writer likes to think about the possibility that the words they're putting out there aren't being picked up.

That's why I write. The stories in my head amuse me, frustrate me, infuriate me. But they never feel really done until I've shared them with someone. Seeing someone else's face as they get into a story I'm telling is better than chocolate to me. And that's saying something... because I flipping LOVE chocolate. You know that thing puppies do when they get really excited and their whole body wags? That's how I feel every time someone tells me how they laughed at something I wrote, or how they totally connected with the characters.

I felt that for the first time, that I can remember, when I was about 7. I was already a pretty avid reader, but I hadn't, as best I recall, ever really written anything before. My mother took me with her when she went to visit a girlfriend of hers, someone she'd gone to school with. While they drank coffee and talked, I sat at her friend's kitchen table and wrote a story. I still have it somewhere. It was about a lady scientist who lived in a black & white world and invented colors in a cauldron in her basement.

I remember presenting the story to my mother and her friend. And my mom's friend, Pat, asked me the question that I think probably started me down the road to where I am right this second. "And then what happened?"

That was it. The first time I felt that all over wriggly feeling. Now, Pat was probably just being kind to a little kid. I had been pretty well-behaved while she and my mom hung out. But that was it for me. From that moment on I wanted to tell people stories and make them ask 'Then what?

Barely two weeks ago, my first novella, Twisted Arrangement, was published in ebook on Amazon. As reviews and ratings are slowly starting to trickle in, I'm being overwhelmed by that full body wag feeling in my soul. And I can't express enough how every single comment and interaction with the people who are reading my work is making me feel. Cat tells me the word I'm looking for is 'mrrrrreoWa'. Apparently it doesn't translate into English.

This first blog post is probably a little rough. Kind of all over the place. I know it might not have... you know... done it for you. But I hope you'll stick around. I'll get better, I promise. It just takes practice, right?