7 things about my writing life

I was tagged on Facebook by Lorelei Bell to reveal seven things about my writing life. I’m not going to tag anyone (‘cause I don’t do that), but I think I can come up with seven little known, if not terribly interesting, things:

            I was diagnosed as a kid as being dyslexic—and never knew it. My mother apparently assumed I remembered, and dropped that bombshell on me in an off the cuff remark just a few weeks ago. It must have been a mild case, and the teachers worked me through it; but I do occasionally transpose numbers and letters, something I’d just assumed were normal mistakes.

I wasn’t yet old enough to write when I composed my first story, a fanfiction about my trip to Oz. My mother typed it out for me until I lost interest, and never completed it.

My first completed story was a few years later, when I wrote down a dream I had about being taken into the sky on a UFO made of books (!) My brother refused to believe I’d dreamed that. Like my conscious mind could have thought it up!

In 2003 I sent a manuscript (Radio Red, as I recall) to a publisher, and after not hearing from them for a year I learned that they’d gone out of business. I sent a follow-up query to be sure, and got a phone call from the former publisher—who’d decided to try being an agent, and offered to take me on as a client. I had an agent! Yay!

Three years later, after a few bites here and there, he decided to quit the business.

To add insult to injury, in 2009 Mark Hunter signed a contract to get his new novel published … Mark Hunter of Great Britain. Even Mark Hunter was having more publishing success than Mark Hunter.

In June, 2010, my grandson was rushed to the emergency room, and my car was totaled when a hit and run driver crashed into my daughter. I’d been up 24 hours and was physically and emotionally exhausted when I checked my e-mail and found an acceptance letter from Whiskey Creek Press, for Storm Chaser—my first book contract. I printed it out and went to sleep. It was all very anticlimactic.

 My wife and I met on a writer’s website (Well, she wasn’t my wife then). She thought, based on my writing style, that I was female.