What makes us do that?

Author.
What a lovely word. A title I always dreamed would someday be mine. Since the release of my first novel, The Timestone Key, on October 19, I’ve been pinching myself a lot—trying to make sure that this experience is a dream-come-true and not just a dream.

When I was 22, I was in my first interview for my first job, an English teacher position at the local high school. The superintendent asked me what I saw myself doing when I was forty. I realize now that the definitive answer would have been something that mentioned still being a teacher at that school. Instead, in my naiveté, I answered, “I hope to have written the great American novel.”

Well, it isn’t exactly THE great American novel, and I didn’t make it by the time I reached forty, but seeing my name on the front cover of a book is certainly the fulfillment of a life-long dream for me.

The Timestone Key is the story of my heart—a romantic Arthurian fantasy conceived while on a vacation in England. I dragged my husband from one Arthurian site to another on my own quest. Stonehenge. Camelford. Tintagel. Glastonbury Tor. The places themselves conjured a story in my mind. I couldn’t rest until I had it written down.

What is it that drives us to tell our stories? Where does the compulsion originate? In her famous diary, Anne Frank wrote: “I want to go on living even after I die.” Poignant words from a writer lost to us well before her time should have even begun. But I get what Anne was saying. I want my children and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren to know who I was and what made me tick. It’s a way to touch immortality at some level.

So today, we’re celebrating life and dreams that come true! Share with me what compels you to write or read or draw or do whatever it is that you truly love.

And BTW, I got that teaching job!