I remember it started when I was in 6th grade, and Mom bought a Word Processor (it was 1994, after all). She set up a card table in her room to be her office, and she would write for hours and hours. She was a woman obsessed, working almost full time on what I, in my sixth grade mind, considered “nothing”. Besides, the only authors I read were, well, famous.
Then the manuscripts started to be sent out, and we kept getting letters in the mail from publishers stating, “We love your work! Unfortunately …” and I thought, she’ll get tired of this soon.
Then Mom started sending out more, and more! She didn’t care that she wasn’t published; she knew what she had to do. She’d work, then come home, make us dinner, and then start writing. She tried to get my sister and me to read some of her writing.
“We will when you’re published,” we said, thinking that we’d never have to make good on our offer. It was just a phase, she would move on.
When I entered college in 2001, Mom was still writing most of her days. She would set time limits, and do research. Sometimes I would call her and she would be “busy”. Busy doing what? Writing, of course. This was turning into a very long phase.
Congrats, Mom, on being published! Now I guess I’ll have to read it.
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This blog, of course, is my favorite!
Your post is my favorite!
Isn’t it wonderful seeing our worlds and obsessions through our daughter’s eyes! Thanks Stacey for giving some of us other writers this bit of encouragement
> I remember it started when I was in 6th grade, and Mom bought a Word Processor
> (it was 1994, after all).
I had the original 1984 Mac in HS, and it came with MacWord (they’d considered calling it MacAuthor and the paint program Macelangelo, but saner heads prevailed). It only let you write five pages before it was full and a new file had to be opened. It took about a minute to say a document. And there were about ten fonts available (which was a LOT at the time! I remember when they added more, and I thought “Why do you need more than TEN? That’s overkill.”) Since I haven’t used a typewriter since middle school I’d be lost with the word processor. And they could do FOOTNOTES! Wow, how did we survive before??