Part One: Introduction

Finally, I'm going to start posting the best of the best (or what I thought was the best) from my old, abandoned blog.  Here is page one....

As a child, I loved to draw and write.  Even if I wasn’t very good at it, I would create little “books” out of notebook paper, stapled together and complete with illustrations.  I was going to be an artist, I told myself.  Of course at one point in my young life, I also vowed to become a ballerina.  No one told me then that short girls do not become professional dancers, so I had no reason to believe otherwise.  I was determined to be a ballerina-princess.  Yes, a princess!

    Naturally, the wish to become a dancer only lasted for about a minuet.  Later, I wanted to become a rock star, only minus the cocaine habit.  In the end, I decided that I was simply in a rush to begin adulthood.  I moved out at seventeen, after receiving my high school diploma, thank you very much.  I moved in with my boyfriend of three years and we married three years later.  I was twenty for those of you with fuzzy math skills. 

Shawn (the husband) was twenty-two when we married.  I had begun a--ha ha--lucrative career in blue collar and Shawn had done the same.

    Still, I kept writing.  As an adult I had found the notebooks I had filled with teenage angst.  A whole pile of them.  I browsed through them.  Whole pages, front and back, in tiny writing were nothing more than the words of a seriously messed up teenage girl filled with anger, depression, and self loathing.

    I decided it wasn’t worth keeping.  I bagged them up and carried them to the Dumpster behind our house.  I considered the hours and hours I put into writing those pages.  Then I considered that those long hours and hours were merely a waste and wasn’t me anymore.  Hasn’t been for a long, long time.  I had a sense of pride as I trotted (yes, trotted) away from the Dumpster.  The old me was in the trash.  I had little to remind anyone of the old me unless you count the thousands of photos my mother hoards in her albums. 

    I still think I was too short to pull off the Grunge Look.  My generation was told that we could be whatever we wanted.  They were wrong.  My fingers are much too short to be a concert pianist.  My feet are too ugly (thanks, Dad) for me to become a foot model.  But anyone can be a writer.  Anyone.  In the age of YouTube and blogging, everyone can have their very own fifteen minuets of fame, even is all it amounts to is a prospective employer viewing some embarrassing footage of you on the internet that your college roommate posted, unbeknownst to you.

    So why not me?  I’ll probably write hundreds of pages, only to lose it all in a horrible Pepsi Virus (Definition:  When someone spills Pepsi onto the keyboard and the computer explodes), cry for days until I try to give it another go.  Then I’ll spend two years trying to get published until I give up and offer my book for free in a downloadable form and continue on in the wonderful world of blue collar.

    But I’ll never know if I don’t at least try.  If you’re reading this, I only hope it is in the form of a real book and not a bunch of papers stapled together.  Please don’t laugh at my illustrations.