Life is full of unexpected twists and turns, with few straights. When I was eleven, I thought I might someday be a writer. I loved to write. I remember an incident when one of my teachers at St. Agustin punished a wayward pupil by requiring him to write a three-page essay using all the lines on each page describing the inside of a bubble, He whined about how hard the assignment was going to be. Me? I got jealous. I rushed home, wrote my essay, and the next day I did my best to get caught doing something wrong so I could turn in my essay.

When I was a beginning ninth grader, in the first week of class, my English teacher had his students write two one-page essays. I think he made this assignment to get a sense of his students' writing skills. After he read my essays, he told me I had the makings of a writer and recommended I get myself a thesaurus and a quality dictionary. I had never heard of a thesaurus but I found a used book that said it was a book of synonyms and antonyms. It didn't call itself a thesaurus but I figured it would do. And it was cheap.

I eventually decided I did want to be a writer but only a part-time writer. The world felt too large and too exciting for me to limit myself to a solo profession. I wanted interactions with people, travel, parties, and opportunities for shared creativity. After some twists and turns, I ended up co-founding a children's music project that gave me all the ensemble creativity I craved. I'm still doing the project today and I love it.

Unfortunately, running the project didn't stop the gnawing desire to write. Eventually, I reached age fifty and decided it was my now-or-never moment. I would either start writing or I'd never write. My advanced age didn't intimidate me. I had no dreams of fame. I simply wanted to write and to have some number of readers of my works. I didn't need a bestseller just a modest audience that derived some pleasure from reading my stories.

So I wrote a couple of adult novels and put them in a desk drawer. They were practice novels. Then I wrote a children's novel and decided to find an agent. I submitted my work to five agents and one of them, a longtime agent who had represented some great novels like WHITE OLEANDER and WICKED, liked my work and offered to represent me.

At the time, WICKED was a great success and I started to think it wouldn't be such a terrible thing to be a best-selling author. While my agent was beginning to market my story, I finished another children's novel, showed it to him, and he liked it even more than the one he was then marketing. We conferred and decided to shift direction toward marketing the new novel.

Before my agent had gotten very far, out of the blue he contacted me to say he was retiring. This was certainly a setback but it didn't feel very significant at the time. I had found it easy to get my first agent and there was no reason to believe finding a new agent would be any harder.

In hindsight, my disappointment over losing my agent was probably greater than I understood at the time. Rather than plunging into the search for a new agent, I decided to write another children's novel. This took around two years and I did do some searching for a new agent during this period but it was halfhearted. And unsuccessful. For some reason, none of the agents I approached seemed particularly impressed by my writing.

The thing is, once I started to write, I had to write. It didn't take long for me to get back to where I had started. Writing was the need. Being published and having a multitude of readers would be fine bonuses but they weren't essential. Sitting in front of my keyboard and creating stories had become as basic and necessary to me as breathing air and eating for nourishment.

After a lot more twists and turns which I'll skip describing, I submitted my third novel (DARK CURSES, FAERIE DREAMS) to an Arizona publisher, Saguaro Books, and the publisher enthusiastically offered me a contract. Saguaro Books is a small publisher that markets selectively and prints hard copies only as needed. As a result, my book will never be on the shelves of any bookstores unless I arrange the deals myself. As with all small press authors, much of the responsibility for marketing will fall on me. I don't mind this. Lots of great writers had to do their own selling. And I like being master of my fate.

In truth, it feels great to be published. It means some people will read my novel. The story is about three kids who make a terrible mistake but prove themselves responsible enough to fix it no matter what the cost. During the long, demanding process of making right what they've wronged, the story's heroes discover much about themselves, about the natural world around them, and about what's important in life. They learn and grow - much as I've done during my own demanding process of going from non-writer to writer.

I can hardly wait to write my next novel, to face the next set of twists and turns, and like the kids in DARK CURSES, FAERIE DREAMS, to learn and discover by risking and doing.