Month 2 of the Year 30

           One month into my blog and I am already on the brink of missing my own deadline! As promised, February has been a busy month and a difficult one for scheduling something new and exciting to try. I’ll leave exciting for another month but I do have a “first” to announce this month: I’ve had the privilege this month to prepare my first book for publication! As a grad assistant, I’ve been able to work for a professor who writes educational children’s coloring books and a year ago he offered me the opportunity to help research and write a book about people and places in South Carolina. But before I say more about this book, I wanted to reflect on my past thirty years (gulp) as a writer.

            I have been writing ever since I was a little girl; it has always come naturally to me. Some days as a kid when time was abundant, I would just say, “I feel like writing a book today,” and I would sit down and in a few hours dash off a story. When the writing bug stopped biting, I would staple the pages together, slap on a title, and voila, a book was born.

            Some stories were better than others. For example, my sister and I co-wrote a book entitled, “What ever happened to Bugs Bunny, Tweety, and the Gang?” in which we imagined the lives of the Bugs Bunny characters after their show went off the air (did that show ever go off the air?). A few got married and were happy, but most met tragic, untimely ends and died alone. Not Valentines Day reading.

            The majority of my books were pre-teen fiction mirroring the fluff I then read. I did a couple of spin-offs of the Babysitters’ Club. Then I created a series called the “Friends Forever Club” about seven best friends who were teen girls. I wrote seven novellas, one book about each girl (hmmm…sounds nothing like the Babysitters’ Club). These books were not burdened with a plot for the most part; they mostly consisted of descriptions of what the girls were wearing and cat fights between the girls who were supposedly “friends forever.” The last book in the series (about Faith) actually had a plot, which showed my growth perhaps as a writer, but it was never completed. Poor Faith was kidnapped for unexplained reasons by two stock criminal characters named Lefty and Red…but no worries, she was going to escape, eventually.

            These were books I wrote for fun, but of course I wrote stories for school assignments as well that were slightly less silly and which had to have plots and conclusions. It always amazed me in school when I’d be recognized for something I’d written since it came so naturally. I remember in elementary school writing a witty little conversation between clothes hanging in a closet, and it was published in some sort of anthology. In sixth grade I wrote a story about a Japanese girl named Shing Ho and suddenly I was whisked off to a young writer’s conference in the state capital. There I met other kids who took themselves and their writing very seriously; it was not the place for a girl who wrote failed kidnapping stories, if you know what I mean.

            In my teen years, I finally learned from those conference kids and became a little more serious about my writing though I think I lost some of my naivete and joy. I was more self-conscious and critical, always finding fault with stories that now read to me like Sunday school lessons. I knew that to write a good story I had to have plot, conflict, AND resolution--sigh. During my teen years, I took a stab at journalism and wrote a monthly article titled, “Kids’ Korner” (it was very important to me that “corner” be spelled with a ‘k’) for my church’s newsletter. I did book reviews, interviews, and I can’t remember what else. Sadly, with my increasing frustration at not being able to produce the kind of literature that could stand the test of time (or that could at least have a decent plot and three-dimensional characters) I stopped writing as much. Of course, I was also getting older and busier…and perhaps more mercenary. For as a college senior I entered two contests—one political science essay contest and the university literary anthology contest—merely for the financial rewards. Amazingly, I won first place in both, and the honor is now more important to me than the money was then.

            Since college, however, I haven’t really written much creatively. Perhaps I peaked with Shing Ho in sixth grade. I wrote and illustrated books for each of my nieces and nephews, which was fun, and which was perhaps my only real preparation for my current project.

            Ah, a satisfying segue.

            Now that I’m back in school, I am doing more academic than creative writing, but I’ve also had the aforementioned privilege of collaboratively writing South Carolina People and Places. It has been really neat to watch the process unfold, from working with others to create lists of possible people and places to include, to researching and writing individual pages, to finding pictures our illustrator could use, to discussing with another GA how to lay out and organize the book. I remember our excitement in deciding that the book should be laid out as a tour of the state through all of its regions. Gradually, all 64 pages have emerged, pictures have been drawn, activity pages have been fashioned, cover designs and graphics have been selected, countless edits have been made, and educators have filled the back cover with endorsements. We’ve even begun the marketing side of the process—collecting information about places in the state that might be interested in selling it. I feel really pleased with how South Carolina People and Places has turned out, and I’m thrilled that tomorrow, March 1^st, my first book goes to the printer!!