For years I was unable to admit — even to myself — that I wanted to be a writer. A good story seemed to me the most precious of all magic and surely only a genius or deity could create something so wondrous that allowed you to live another life, to experience emotions and events far removed from your own reality.
After more than ten years of serious effort, I have finally been published. Small Change: The Secret Life of Penny Burford, first available as an audio book through the Audio Book Club and Amazon.com, is now on bookshelves in a hardcover edition. After untold hours of secretive pecking, I can finally call myself a writer without that flush of embarrassed heat creeping into my cheeks.
Now that I’ve come out of the closet, so to speak, people ask me when I started writing. I’m not sure what to tell them. I actually attempted writing my first novel when I was thirteen. That was the year my mother bribed me to read Gone with the Wind. I read the same tattered copy my mother had checked out from her high school library in the early 1960s and couldn’t bear to give back. (In case any library police are reading this, she swears she paid for that “lost” book. Mom also tells me that she was almost finished when her date arrived on a Saturday night. She took the book with her, told her date not to even speak to her until she was finished, and read the last fifty pages by flashlight at the drive-in.)
I spent an entire summer reading GWTW. I’d finish the last page and turn immediately back to the beginning and start over. My father finally looked at me one day and said, “Haven’t you finished that book yet? Every time I look at you, you’ve got your nose in that same book.” When I explained that I was reading it for the sixth time, he sighed and said, “Read something else! You’re as bad as your mother!”
I decided I would find some way to get Scarlett and Rhett back together, but my efforts stalled quickly. I had a vague concept of something called a “copyright," and I didn’t want to break any laws. (I was, then, a stickler for the Rules, the kind of unnatural child who knows where her Christmas presents are hidden but does not dare peek. Ever.) So I tried to write my “own” Civil War saga. It was terrible, of course; I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how my characters might survive the war without suffering too much. Shows you how much I knew about writing then, doesn’t it? Now I spend all my time seeing how much I can complicate my characters' lives.
