Work in Progress

Why do I write? Because God has given me a written voice. Sometimes I think I write better than I talk. When you live alone you tend to talk to the dog, the pictures, the walls, anything that will listen, but mostly you don't talk. You forget how sometimes.

I think the hardest thing for me about being a writer is that I'm writing on so many things I don't know which one to work on first, or put the most effort into. Right now my priority has been on a non-fiction book, working title, God's Promises. It is a daily devotional with one of God's promises for every day of the year. So far I have written from January 1st through September 21st. That became my priority when a young man I met at Teen Serve gave me money for my book I wasn't done writing yet.

I've got several books in various stages of completion that I am working on. I also journal every day. Three different kinds of journals. I enjoy hearing the scratch of the pen on paper. Most of the time if I am writing larger projects, I will type them into the computer, but prior to that I enter it into my notebook. Depending on the day, the words change between what is in the notebook to what goes into the computer. For me, writing is a work in progress.

I started writing my first book when I was reading a book by Marshall Cook entitled Freeing Your Creativity. I would write a chapter and then let Mom read it. Mom wrote when she was younger and then got married and had ten children. She had no time to write then. She saw her dream come true through me.

The book slowed down when I ran my own newspaper out of the basement of my home using InDesign. The Pike River Community News came out every other week. The Plymouth Review did the printing for me.

I continued to write until I had two strokes in one night on March 31, 2005. At that point I had no "N" in my alphabet for quite awhile. I didn't know whether I was "writing", "righting" or "riteing". And the more I thought about it the worse it got. I started therapy to learn how to swallow, walk, talk, think, remember, and undo the paralysis in my face and throat. I had no gag reflex. On the 27th of May my mother passed away and I didn't pick up the writing process again for months. I started writing again the following year when I moved up to the U.P.

In 2007 I moved down to Tucson, Arizona and did a lot of writing on the book. In February of 2008 my son passed away. I wrote about death, and grief, and about my son and all that transpired with the funeral and afterwards. I could not even think of writing on my book. It was about a year later when I convinced myself that I had gotten so far into the book that I just had to finish it. It was first published in 2010 by Magellan Books.