Thursday, September 24, 2009

First Blog

Hello World!

One of my aspirations is to be a children's author. No its not for the money. Rather, I have always loved books. As a young child my mom and dad were always reading to me. Okay, mostly mom. In fact the only book that my dad has ever read was "The Amityville Horror." If that's spelled wrong please correct me. Even that was when he was a young man. Anyways, as I was saying, I loved to read. Being a military brat I grew up on Air Force bases. My parents also cleaned base housing once the tenants moved out. Needless to say, my sister and I had lots of spare time while mom and dad were washing walls and such. Mom would take us to the library and we would get sacks full of books and read them all the time. Hundreds of them, from my favorites the Hardy Boys and the Three Investigators to all kinds of other stories and mysteries.

As a kid I started my own mystery series based on the Hardy Boys and Three Investigators. Recently my mother had been doing some house cleaning and found a very old notebook. She looked inside and found my first partially handwritten mystery novel, "The Red Ribbon Gang." Yes, as a 10-year old I had started to write my own book. She managed to send it home with my oldest daughter after she had visited them for a week this summer. It was a surprise to find it. Of course I just had to read it. There were lots of mistakes and extremely bad grammar in places, but the story was overall very good.

It was at that moment that I remembered how much I enjoyed writing stories. All of these years had passed and I had forgotten that I loved to write. I decided right then and there to write a story and attempt to live out one of my childhood dreams and become a published author. Especially since baseball is now out of the question. :)

Now I realize that becoming a published author is no easy task. I know that the first "real" book that I write will probably be crap. I can deal with that. Over the last three weeks since I rediscovered my passion for writing I have been overjoyed.

I wrote a little children's board book for my girls this last week. I read it to them tonight. Needless to say they loved it. Even if it were to never be made into a book the look in their eyes when I read it to them off of the computer was priceless (it was the first time they had heard a story with their names in it). So far, that's good enough for me.

My next step is of course coming up with more ideas and writing more stories. I plan to have a base of stories and join a writers group here locally (Tallahassee Florida) and have them critiqued. If any can be good enough I will then send it/them off. I have tons to write about and tons of research to do but am extremely excited to be started already.

I recently started an account with Twitter. Look for me, bwileyjax. I find Twitter especially helpful and try to make it to #kidlitchat on Wednesday nights at 9PM EST.

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