Getting Started -- writing tip.

Question from the e-mail: Arline, how did you get started as a writer? How did you find time to write?

Answer: I am a late-bloomer, but from the time I learned to read, I had wanted to be a writer. Life happened. Then two other things happened. I hit 40 and read a book called Wish-Craft.

That book changed my life. In essence it said that it's never too late to pursue your dreams. All you have to do then, is follow them in ways that fit in with with your practical day-t0-day life. I wanted to be a writer. I lived in the boonies, had a husband, home, full time job, and juggled two teenagers with college classes. I had thought that "following my dream" would mean leaving everything else I cared about behind so I had never pursued that dream. But the book said, if I wanted to be a writer, the important thing was to write: on some level, somewhere. I took a writing class as part of my college work and started writing and thanks to the good advice I found in Writer's Digest magazine, I started selling right away.

Articles and short stories were written between 4 a.m. and 6:30 when the kids got up. Mostly they sold to small magazines or regional magazines and newspapers. I sure didn't get rich on them. But I was enriched BY them.

When arthritis interfered with my job as a librarian (books are heavy, yunnno), I was offered the only job I ever had in my life that didn't require my lifting anything heavier than a pencil. Due to that job, as a reporter on a Daily newspaper, I only wrote one book, Killraven, before disability sent me home for good.

Then I had more time to write books.