When I was a young girl we lived in the country. I grew up to the sound of cicadas, walked on my hands and knees around the garden with the family cat, sat in the branches of trees and thought about nothing in particular, lay in the tall grass and made up songs, waded in the river at the back of our property with my younger sisters, read, played the guitar, sang, and filled notebooks full of words.
But loving story and writing words down does not mean you know how to put a novel together. That comes with a lot of writing, a lot of reading, and a lot of trial and error. But the excitement has never left. Persevering through the challenges, walking in the dark and taking the next step forward even when I don’t know where it will lead, is story in the making. Seeing it slowly come together is magical.
So why do I write Young Adult Fantasy?
All my life I have been fascinated with the blur between two worlds: what we think of as reality; and the supernatural, spiritual world. Those things that can’t be explained but that are part of everyday life. And the bigger things; the things that are possum crazy that you don’t want to share with your friends because they are going to look at you sidewise – but are there. That’s what I like to write about. Walking in Divine Mysteries with God who loves us; experiencing things that can’t be explained and could freak us out if we didn’t trust in a protector. It’s a lot of fun to write and to read – and to live.
My Writing Voice
I have written A LOT of stories, snippets of stories, and ideas that never came to anything. It takes a while to find your voice and to keep believing in your story enough to get it finished. You can’t afford to start doubting yourself or your story before it’s done. You’ve got to push through and get it all down. So it’s taken me many, many years to get to the point where I’ve learned to push through, keep going and finally have a completed draft.
When I look back over all those years of writing I realise my writing voice had always been there, along with the gold of the story. The rest of the skills needed to catch up so that I could do justice to it. And once I learned to just keep going, it really did become possible.
Writing allows me to weave in all the different elements of reality, truth, beauty – and glimpses of the possum crazy. There’s nothing quite like it.