Monday, April 30, 2012

I'm a writer, right?

I never really started out to become a writer. My goal in high school was actually to be a secretary. I could type. I could type really well. Fast. I topped out at 100 words per minute. So I paid my dues, if you can say starting out as a receptionist, leading up to a secretary was paying dues.
Perhaps because I liked to type, to make documents look decent, and wanted to use the fewest possible key strokes to make the documents look good, I learned word processing software better than most. This led me to teaching software to adults (the most fun ever), which led me to teaching computer hardware and networking as well. Then it morphed into teaching high school dropouts when a position opened up in that department (the most rewarding job ever). But that led to a desire to help high school students before they actually dropped out and I began teaching history at a local high school. I had a lovely time there and loved my students. Yes, even the really difficult, obnoxious ones, even the one I thought would probably shoot me in a drive by. Obviously I won him over, because I'm still here. But then my dad got sick. He lived almost 800 miles away from me and while I didn't (and don't) think that he needs to live in a nursing home, I felt that he shouldn't live alone. So this past year I haven't been with my students and I really missed them. I was used to being really busy, working multiple jobs, but suddenly I didn't have much to do. I was bored. And I wondered how I could still connect with my students or any students, so I wrote Silver Knight. I hope it is enjoyable to people and inspires curiosity. And now I consider myself a writer.