How it all started.

To understand how I became a writer, we have to go to the beginning.

I am a bastard child (sorry mom). A child born out of wedlock. Which really doesn’t matter, but you have to know that to understand.

I met the man I call my father when I was around two and a half years old. My mom and I were a package deal. My dad accepted me and he became the only man I ever considered my father. For all intents and purposes, he was a great father. I wanted for nothing.

Well, except a sober father.

But back then, I really didn’t understand. I knew he was drunk, but I didn’t understand what that meant. I just knew that I wasn’t suppose to drink his Diet Coke.

When I was six years old my aunt threatened my mom that she was going to tell me that he wasn’t my real father, which backed my mother into a corner and made it so she felt like she had to tell me. When I was six, my mother was twenty-six. I remember that day like it was yesterday. We sat out front in the chairs. I sat in my dad’s lap and my mom told me that he wasn’t my biological father. That his blood didn’t run through my veins.

I remember looking at my dad and asking if he still loved me. Of course he did.

So I said that it doesn't matter. That he was my dad.

Of course after that I was curious who my biological father was, but that doesn’t come into play in this story.

I was almost ten years old when my mom got pregnant with my little sister. Once she was born, I finally understood that I wasn’t his child.

It wasn’t something I just came to understand. It was a slow difference in the way I was treated not only by him, but by his side of the family. No child wants to feel different, but with the birth of my blue eyed, angel face sister, It became evident that I was the other kid.

As most kids with a ten year age gap, my sister and I grew up vastly different. I was to be seen and not heard, speak only when spoken to.

My sister commanded the room, and got whatever she wanted.

Now I want to preface everything by saying my sister is the light of my life. She is my sun and I would die for her. I love her more than anything else on this planet.

But it always wasn’t that way.

I could have been a better sister, but with her birth, suddenly I wasn’t Daddy’s little girl anymore. I was the other girl. The worthless, lazy ungrateful child. I was the child that he used to hurt my mother.

With the change of my dad’s behavior I slowly felt like I was being forgotten. So, my child brain decided, if I write a book and publish it, I would never be forgotten.

So the dream to not be forgotten planted its seed in my mind.

I have a shelf full of composition notebooks with short stories started, most never finished. My first story I ever started and finished was for an elementary English class. One of my mothers co workers read it over and I can vaguely remember his praise, but I remember nothing of the story itself. When it comes to the old poems and stories I wrote, I’m a hoarder. I have them all and I am sure I could dig them up, but I know it will give me second hand embarrassment.

Second story I started and finished was my first year of college. I went to college and was perusing an English major. I thought I could be a teacher. Funny enough, even then I knew I wasn’t much of a kids person, but I wanted to give what I didn’t receive. I wanted to fuel someone’s creativity. I thought by being an English teacher I could encourage and help someone else’s abilities.

My creative writing professor was a sarcastic older woman. She was jaded in love and talked a lot of crap on her ex husband. One assignment she gave was writing a short story with a word count minimum.

I don’t remember the story I wrote word for word, but I do remember it was about rape. It was about a girl running away from home and lighting her home on fire to kill her rapist. I wrote it in a way that was slightly mysterious. You didn’t know what she went through until the end. She met someone along the way who protected her and kept her secret. Made her feel safe.

I honestly don’t remember putting a lot of effort into it. It was a short story, maybe about 20K words. I turned it in and it was graded. I do remember getting an A, I also remember my professor pulling me aside and telling me she wanted me to expand on the story, and that she saw talent in me.

I remember sort of rolling my eyes at the whole idea. I was probably around eighteen or nineteen at the time. I was angrier than ever and I had never really been encouraged by any adult on my writing capabilities.

I didn’t know how to process praise.

I was going through a lot and my world, how small it was back then, was falling in on itself.

That was late 2011, early 2012.

Well Professor, I finally wrote that story into a book twelve years later.

Falling Too Late.