Fluke?

I started writing when I was just a little kid in elementary school. I wrote plays and stories and loved to read them to my class or other classes. Then as I got a little older I became more timid about my writing and stuck to my diary--of course thinking it was a private place to write and my mother wouldn't read it. I had secret codes that were decoded on the last page in case I forgot what my code stood for. For instance, S2C was decoded in the back as smoked 2 cigarettes. Oh, the naiveté of youth. Then in high school I became a real closet writer--I didn't want to be thought of as a geek. I wanted to major in journalism when I went to college but back in the age of dinosaurs a lot of state universitites, like the University of North Carolina, didn't allow women except for the school of nursing. They had a great journalism program, but my gender locked me out. I ended up at East Carolina University as an English major, but then switched to education. Education and nursing were about the only careers for women then. Wow, things have changed--for the better!

I did take a creative writing class and did horribly. I had huge differences with the professor and hadn't lived long enough to know that I should assess my methods for achieving my goal. In other words, my goal was to pass the class, but no, I had to lock horns with the professor when I should have swallowed back my opinions and just gotten on with it.

After college I did what all women did then. I got married. In the back of my mind I was always going to write. But things got in the way like the housekeeping thing, then the diapers, then carpooling and working, then soccer and t-ball, then . . . It just kept on until one day I had a birthday that got my attention. I realized I'd better get busy, time was running out. I went out and bought a computer that I didn't know how to work. It was an Apple 2c with a tiny green screen. I brought it home to the shock of my family, set it up near the kitchen and waited until after everyone was in bed. I sat my butt down in front of the thing that had just cost my family all its savings plus, switched the thing on, and then was horror struck. I had nothing to say, no story to tell.

I'll never forget that moment of terror. Of course I did come up with a story (I used to wirte historical fiction under another name) and finally belched up 100,000 words. Yet even today, every time I start a new book, I get that same shudder of fear. Can I do it again or was it just a fluke. Sometimes I think they have all been flukes.