I really didn’t start reading until I was a freshman in high school. The book that made a difference for me was one by Louis L'Amour called Tucker. Then one day, standing in line at the grocery store, I saw my first romance novel. It was love at first sight. The book was titled, The Wolf and The Dove, by Kathleen E Woodwiss. I remember wrapping the cover in aluminum foil so my mother would not see what I was reading and burn it. (It had an armored knight on a dark brown horse with a beautiful woman in a lovely gown pulled across his lap with his arms wrapped around her protectively.) I finished the book in two days. After that, I was hooked. The more I read, the more I wanted to write. English grammar was not my thing, but I couldn’t shake the desire within me that wanted to be a writer.
I became what I called a closet writer. Heaven forbid, someone should ever find out what I wanted to do. At first I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in Hades. So I wrote in secret. Not in a journal, but in a spiral notebook. I thought I could write on the sly and no one would ever know. It worked for a while, but then I got married. One day my husband caught me writing. I was ashamed, only because, I thought I wasn’t any good. He wanted to see what I was writing and I didn’t want to share. We had the biggest fight over that single green notebook.
Some years after his death, out of the blue a friend invited me to apply at a local newspaper as a freelance writer. It was an Ag paper of all things. What in the world did I know about the world of agriculture? Well, they accepted several articles and published them. (It was a good thing my friend and the editor fixed my mistakes.) Praise the Lord, I was finally out of the closet. Those first stories were something. I struggled with grammar and punctuation (I still do, but I’m happy to say that has improved, thanks to my sister-mentors and a few English comp classes).
I’m not sure how I got into a Christian Writers Group, my friend from the paper was there too. When the group disbanded, we decided to keep it going. We joined forces with two other writers. The four of us developed a wonderful friendship, and the three of them took me in under their wings and became my mentors. We did a lot of writing in the beginning and it was those ladies that began to mold me and make me a better writer. I still have a long way to go, but I’ve come so far.
The moral of my story is—if you have a dream. Dream it. If you want to be a writer—write. But it will be a lot easier if you have someone who can direct your path like I did. I will be forever grateful to these beautiful ladies for their love, patience, and guidance. Thank you so much, Sherry, Pat, and Jerolyn.
by Christine Stamp
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