Okay, I've covered technology, education, gratitude, and a few other subjects. I think it's time to talk about organization. So, if you're looking for someone who is great at keeping track of stuff, you've come to the wrong author. I've lost more than one book. Yes, lost books.... Entire manuscripts filed away in the bowels of my computer files only to be located much later. I have a system of sorts that I use now so I no longer lose things electronically, but it essentially consists of making sure my agent has it because I'm pretty much hopeless. To illustrate this point, I recently found a picture book I wrote in 2012 on a piece of paper folded in a stack of junk in an old backpack.
Now that you know I'm hopeless at organizing, lets hop way back in time to school, fourth grade to be specific. For the first time I wrote a poem there and fell in love with the freedom from grammar and sentences. I was released to fly around with only words unbound by paragraphs and requirements. Only cadence and sound mattered. The rules changed so drastically and opened something new inside of me that year I earned my blue belt in karate and found the spark of poetry inside of me. I was no prodigy, far from it, but that didn't matter because once poetry found a place in my life, it grew deep roots that intertwined with my being and the very beating of my heart.
Through Middle School and High School, the poetry flourished and grew, popping out poems every week. I read and connected with Emily Dickinson in eleventh grade English and so many other amazing poets after her. My poetry grew and I reached into the odd sci-fi worlds I dreamed up with strange characters named Cattertwock-thock-thock-thock and Shemantlequah who were not even remotely human. They were strange and unrealatable stories that crack me up to read now with no motivation to try to fix them. They are the foundation stones of me learning to world build and create characters. I treasure them for what they are, my beginnings.
This paragraph should tell you what I wrote in college and how I fell deeper in love with words while I was there in my full adulthood with academia all around me. I wrote what was assigned in class and haven't looked at it since because none of my classes were focused on writing. I even stopped writing poetry regularly. I wish I could say the literature for children class I took brought a renewal of my writing passion, but it simply brought me to the realization that writing a picture book was impossible. I gave up there. I melted a bunch of wax to build a castle for my final project and decided writing was hard and I couldn't do it.
If you've been following along, you'll know that my first real job after college brought a joking me back to a place where writing became something I claimed as my own. All through college, writing was confined to essays, but poetry poked it's head up from time to time and laid out words on my heart that I had to put to paper. It wasn't until I sat in the back of church one day, that poetry decided its time of dormancy was over. Ever since that day, I've written poetry weekly, even more than back in high school. It got to be a little silly to have all those poems and nothing to do with them, so I did something about it. You're welcome to check out my other blog which is just poetry: https://reflectionoffaith.wordpress.com/
For me, it always comes back to poetry, where words first grew inside of me.