I’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been reading. All thanks to both parents who were both avid readers, though very different kind of books. My mother mostly read romances and historical family sagas — think, the Thorn Birds. My father, on the other hand, who use to take us weekly to the library, would go to the new section of recent arrivals and pick 6 of the biggest books he could find. I’m not kidding. It didn’t matter what they were. Non-fiction, fiction, historical, or sci-fi. He’d read it all. It was his passion and love of reading that also spilled over in to us being taught at very early ages how to form our letters.
Of course, I was smitten. From the minute I realised I could make words with these strange looking letters and make sentences, like: the cat sat on the mat. I was creating my own stories and, when old enough, making them into little booklets with teeny tiny illustration in crayon, of course.
From that point on, I always wrote, at least that is when I wasn’t reading. And, despite my early choice of leaving home at 17 to join the military, I still managed to do not one, but 2 degrees (you know, because I loved writing) and, by a strange twist of fate, ended up working for over 25+ years in the print and publishing trade after leaving the military. A trade that fed my need to both read and to write.
All the while I worked in these trades, I wrote articles, create publications and e-zines, and even created full-size magazines, till print become difficult due to costs. At which point, I went online like so many. And the rest, they say, is history.
I ran two different websites curating fiction for both the sci-fi lover and for the discerning lesbian who wanted to read both good fiction, but also read reviews and interviews with the authors and publishers. I also curated two on-demand print quarterly magazines for both websites, which turned out to be an awful lot of work, but also, great fun to do at the time.
I haven’t stopped writing and have never looked back from that very early age after being encouraged by my parents to just do it.
Footnote: At once point back in 2012, I calculated just how many words (roughly) I might have written over those intervening years, and shocked myself when it came out at over 2 million. A conservative estimate. Don’t ask me how many words I’ve written since then it’s probably a lot.
