This is how I became a writer.
My mother, Bertha, and my father, Bob, were both prolific oral story tellers. Bertha told stories of growing up on the Canadian prairies, and Bob told hunting and fishing tales.
SILENT LIGHT, SILENT LOVE, is a follow up to LANTERN IN THE WINDOW, a western historical story of a mail order bride. Silent Light, Silent Love is about Betsy, a girl who happens to be deaf. I have a deaf son and two deaf step-daughters, and I love their unique views on life. It was a delight to write about Betsy.
Back to becoming.
I learned to read at five, and the same year, I started school in the one room schoolhouse my father had attended. There were fifteen pupils, most of them my relatives. I was put into Grade Two because I could read all the primers.
Then in Grade Three disaster struck. Our teacher that year was Miss Flett, and halfway through the year she was shot by a jealous lover. We were loaded into taxis and taken to town school, a three story brick purgatory with a whopping hundred students—and a library, which I read from A to Z. To say I was a misfit-nerd would be a gross understatment. Reading was my passion, my world.
I read my way into middle age. I was 46 by the time I wrote my first romance and sold it to Harlequin. I sold other romances to Avon, Dorchester, and Zebra.
I wrote about 55 romances in the next twenty years. I read and wrote my way through two marriages, three pregnancies and two divorces, learning by osmosis about plot, character, pacing and what makes a book readable.
I think writers are born with a genetic quirk. They need stories the way other, normal people need oxygen and food. It’s an addiction.
And if they can’t find an intriguing story, they simply write one of their own.
