Remembering My Firsts

I've been writing for I don't know how long. Short little stories that I made up in my sketchbooks on long drives really had no real plot but I loved to draw the pictures to go with it. I've never really been a fan of writing about real life in retrospect. Funny that I've come to realize that just now. It's entirely possible that my preferences were made already as early as third grade. Continue reading on my blog...-->

Words Lost to Time?

Two ways to help you remember

I've spoken to lots of writers and they seem to remember their first stories. I guess a person could say it's a memorable event or time. The Literary Hub

Firsts

I remember when I made my first semi-pro short story sale. It was A Sorcerer By Any Other Name and I sold it to a small zine called Sorcerous Magazine. I later sold the same story to Alexandria Digital Literature. That seems to be how it goes with my short fiction. It always ends up a reprint someplace else.

Continue Reading Here...

A Plethora of Firsts

First things first...I'm just going to get it out of the way and say that every writer has a den, or cave, or mountain stronghold of old first-time-for-that type work that's probably best left unearthed. But here I am, taking the alarm coded locks off of that dusty bin o' old first-times. Seriously, my old grade school/junior high/high school writing folder-of-doom literally has dust and a dead spider on it. Read more...

Merry-Go-Round-Tour for February 18th, 2013

Firsts; what image does that bring up for you? Your first kiss, first car, first love, first paycheck, first child or if you’re a writer, first story, first book, first royalty check?

A life is so full of firsts. It’s hard to pick just one out of so many. I married at 18 and I’m still on that first marriage. In a culture of throw away things, I guess that’s pretty remarkable. Next month it will be thirty-eight years. Nothing throw away about that.

My first paycheck, not counting working as a babysitter for my mom and other families, was from the Johnstown Knitting Mill when I was sixteen.

Continue reading on my blog: 

My first story

I have fat folder filled with one-page scenes. There was a time I looked at all of them and thought they were stories, even though they were hardly scenes. Except one.

It must have been second year of writing, when I reached for one of those old blank application forms I kept around for writing. They were in the size of a letter, so I had these old church sheet music covers and a clamp to keep them all in place. I wrote with pencil, for someone showed me a notebook written in 1910s and all the ink had been smeared, but the pencil work was still intact. I wanted them to last.

The story was 13 handwritten pages long with very small illustrations scribbled on the sides – two portraits, a hand, a birch tree and somewhere was a fountain.

Continue reading "My First Story" here.

MGR Tour: The First

This month’s Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour focuses on our first work.  I know I must have written a story in the second grade.  I think we all do, and... Continue reading on my blog.

First Love

When I heard about this month's topic, I knew exactly what I'd talk about. I was convinced that I'd tell you about some of my first attempts at crafting a story, but in the end I decided not to rehash the past. Those stories are lost to time for a reason...

Instead, I offer you a different kind of first – my first drabble, a one hundred word story complete with a beginning, middle and end.

And in honor of St Valentine’s Day, yesterday, I give you a love story.

The First

I wrote a story when I was about five or six about a young witch and her cat. . . .

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My First Story

In my junior year, I was given a series of pictures in English class. We were told to pick one and write a story. The photo I chose was a black and white shot of a cat in an open doorway, a little white mouse just inside facing him.

I got an A!

My creative writing instructor then required her students to submit stories and poems to the school’s annual literary magazine, The Flowing Pen. Since the last thing I wanted to do was submit anything for rejection, I handed over my English paper.

Next thing I know, I’m in the annual rag. How the heck did THAT happen?

Continue Reading if you want to see the tortured twisting of my sixteen-year-old self...

First Stories

. . .

But when I think of first stories, what I think about is not what I have written, but the stories we tell ourselves even before we think of putting pen to paper.

The stories we convince ourselves are true about us--the deepest part of us. The stories we choose to believe, that shape the face we show the outside world. The stories that limit the full expression of who we can be.

Continue reading "First Stories" at the Once in a Blue Muse Blog

Who's on first?

Late post this month -- sorry.

I’ve had a lot of firsts in my writing career: the first poem I wrote (on daffodils), the first book I started to write (it was supposed to be a Regency romance), the first serial I wrote (portal fantasy), the first short story I submitted (cliché-ridden SF), the first short story I sold (sword and sorcery with an assassin as the protagonist), the first novella I completed (Farwalker), the first book in a series (Christmas Tree Farm Murders), and so on.

To read more about my firsts, read the rest of my blog post.