The Writer Within Me

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

—Ernest Hemingway

I can promise you, I wasn’t born a writer. No, I was born a reader and from the time I understood words, I read. My first literary love were Marvel comic books. Thor, Ironman, Captain America, Hulk, the Fantastic Four, I read them all, from cover to cover, and repeatedly.

As I grew, my taste matured, at least a little. My next love of literature was the sage written by Edgar Rice Burrows, and his hero was Tarzan. Tarzan was my hero as well. From the jungles, to London as I discovered Sir Author Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Louis L’Amour was my favorite western writer. Spy novels were owned by Alistair McClean and police dramas were written by the king of such, Joseph Wambaugh.

All of these were series and I devoured them one after the other but there were also the one and done books. “Smokey the Cow Horse,” written by Will James and “Where The Red Fern Grows,” written by Wilson Rawls. Yes, there were plenty of books and I enjoyed a love affair with all of them, as a reader.

Then, I met Robert Jordan, a teacher from Montana and I travelled with him to Spain to fight in the revolution. Like him, I fell in love with Pillar, the Spanish maiden who would have Jordan’s child. At least, I felt I travelled with him, you see, I was 14 and the adventure was a book written by Earnest Hemingway. That was the book that made me realize I wanted to be a writer.

So, I wrote and discovered I had neither the talent nor the knowledge of writing to be any good. I wrote several dozen secret, and certainly unpublished works. I managed to write a few poems for my daughters over the years and even a song or two, but not a novel. Not so much as a short story. Everything I wrote sounded as if it was written by another, one of my heroes of writing. My efforts sounded like cheap imitations.

In 2010, a dream was shared with me and I knew it would make a fantastic story. I advised the dreamer to write it, instead, she offered it to me. It was the story of a small girl and everyday her mother would place a note in her lunch box. Sadly, the mother died. The notes, kept appearing. Not every day, but when she needed them most, notes appeared to offer support, love, direction, even a word or two of advice.

A year later, in 2011, “Dear Emma” was published as a novella. The day it went live on Amazon, I felt as I did when my daughters were leaving to attend their first days of school. Please don’t let them get picked. I hope they find friends.

Emma did and the response was so strong, I felt that maybe, just maybe I was a writer.

You can find “Dear Emma on Amazon and she is in any of three formats, Kindle, paperback or audio. Maybe you will like her as much as I do.