Years ago, while I was vacationing with family at a favorite cottage near the north cape of PEI, I wrote an "impressionistic sketch" of the house on the shore I had grown to love since my first summer there. I showed the sketch to my aunt, and after she had read it I told her how it was my dream to become a writer, but that I was scared.
"Write. Just write," she told me, and these words stuck with me.
How fitting that the Island would form the setting of an article that is set to appear in Literary Traveler in just a few weeks. I will post a link to it when it is published.
I have published before. A few years ago, I wrote some articles for a local newspaper. But these were assignments. The article I mention above is the first to be published that really comes from me. When I received the acceptance and offer of payment for that article, I felt like a real writer for the first time. In spite of all the writing I have done since I was about fifteen, in my little notebooks, my diaries and on my computer - only when a piece of my own writing I had sincerely loved putting to paper was accepted for publication did I truly feel like a writer.
I am aware this post sounds like a happy conclusion to a long and arduous career. It is not. This is only the beginning. There is (hum hum) that manuscript that has been collecting dust on my computer (figuratively speaking, of course) for the past eight years. That's right. Eight years. Only now do I feel ready to tackle that sucker.
That is, right after I finish writing a few more articles.
