Writer

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer.

In and of itself, this probably isn’t unique. I’m sure most published authors would say much the same thing.  For some, this we walk path was easier; for others, harder. What separates us is mundane, is the dream that matters. And I have lived that dream.

I wrote my first book when I was 12 years-old, though I wouldn’t recommend reading it any time soon. It is the work of a child dipping their toes into their own voice. Despite its flaws, I remember being immeasurably proud of myself when it was completed, a feeling I doubt I’ll ever replicate again. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my passion was never going to be an easy path. Sure, there were some signs but for whatever reason they were never a top priority and more of a passing concern.

As a child, I couldn’t read. I don’t mean I had trouble with reading or I didn’t enjoy it, I mean I could not read if my life depended on it. I couldn’t spell, I couldn’t read, and the idea of learning a second language was as farfetched to me as one day setting foot on the planet Mars. When book reports and reading assignments became a thing I was expected to complete, my illiteracy glowed like a shining star. My writing hung on a display board beside my classmates, unique in its atrocious penmanship and the fact that my book choices were always years behind the level of my peers. I wasn’t a lazy child, but something was wrong.

It was my mother who finally found a way through the impenetrable fog of the written word. When I was in fourth grade, she began to buy me comic books. Bless her, she couldn’t bring herself to buy me anything violent or vulgar, so I was left with Casper and Little Dracula. Content choices which, in hindsight, may provide a glimpse into the foundation of my interest in macabre myths and legends. Short sentences coupled with imagery finally broke through the barrier inside my mind and the fog cleared. At last, I was able to read. I still couldn’t spell to save my soul, but the floodgates opened and I could read.

And did they ever open.

Months after being given my first comic books, I leapt ahead of my peers. Suddenly, I was reading Sherlock Holmes, The Princess Bride, Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe. The book that started it all though, was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was the first book I ever read on my own and it is no understatement to say, it changed my life. This was what I wanted. I wanted to reach someone, anyone, just one person, the way this book had reached me. I suddenly knew who I was meant to be. That little girl promised herself she would get her debut novel published before she turned 30.

I’m not sure how I decided upon the number 30. I think as a thirteen-year-old kid it felt like a long way off, but not too old so as to make life feel over.

Lucky for me, I was born at the perfect moment in time for someone with my still unknown weakness to achieve their dream. By the time I was in middle school most homes had a home computer and internet access, by high school all papers were expected typed and printed in a word processor, and by college every student needed a laptop. Spellcheck saved my neck on more than one occasion. Without it, no matter how hard I tried, words still fell apart as they left my fingers. Once the spelling of a word was committed to memory, it stuck forever, but before memorization, even the simplest ones tripped me up. They still do. You don’t want to know how many little red lines have appeared as I type. But, just as the old fear of never having a calculator on you proved obsolete with the advent of the smartphone, so too did my inability to spell with the advent of spellcheck. In short, I could easily fake it so long as I never had to participate in another dreaded spelling bee ever again.

It wasn’t until college when the general education requirements caught up with me and my university insisted I learn a foreign language, that someone finally noticed something wasn’t right. I’d spend hours sobbing over French homework, forced into taking advance placement courses because I had both French and Spanish on my high school transcripts. My inability to spell in English was only more humiliating in French where, for some reason, I couldn’t even sound out the words and trick my mind into participating. I knew I was putting in the work and I knew I wasn’t incompetent or stupid, so why couldn’t I do this?

I am dyslexic.

It’s a cruel word in and of itself. For a dyslexic to spell out the condition they suffer from they’re forced to trip over a slew of rare letters within the English language. I’d always been told that dyslexia made people read words back to forwards, and I knew that wasn’t my problem. Letters didn’t move around upon the page; I didn’t read them backwards. I just couldn’t read them. It was around this time that I learned how large of an umbrella dyslexion is and that I belonged firmly beneath its shadow.

There was a comfort in this knowledge. At long last, I knew what was wrong. I knew where my limitations lay and where my strengths were. I could manipulate my mind in a way I never had before, trick it into behaving the way society thinks a brain should work. It was only then that I was truly able to write.

I finished my first real novel during my junior year of college in 2007, but didn’t know what came next. The world was changing. The publishing industry didn’t look the same anymore. 2007 was the year Amazon released the Kindle. My future publisher, Amazon Publishing was launched in 2009, and my imprint not even a glint in the milkman’s eye as it were. Agents couldn’t agree if they wanted electronic or paper submissions and all the hard and fast rules seemed to be dissolving. Never the less, I threw my hat into the ring.

It didn’t happen right away. I finished college and moved onto graduate school 3000 miles away from where I was born. I wrote off and on and would try every now and again to find an agent or publisher, but it wasn’t until 2015 that I finally got my break. I signed with an agent and he found me a home with Lake Union Publishing. On April 12, 2016, seven days before my 30th birthday, The Vow was released. I had made my dream a reality. It wasn’t how I thought it would happen. I couldn’t have known when I was 13 what the future would look like, but I made it happen.

The journey doesn’t end there, but this entry does. I’m looking towards the future now and trying to figure out what happens next. There is one thing I know for certain though, the path was never clear. The future evolved before my eyes as I grew up with technology, and I have little doubt it will continue to do so going forward. If that 13-year-old girl could make her dreams a reality, then so to can a 33-year-old woman.