Why do I write?

I was lucky to be raised by people who loved and valued reading. Some of my earliest memories are of me laying my head on my mother’s chest as she read The Three Musketeers aloud to me–doing voices too! At lunch, my grandmother would insist on reading to me so I could ‘concentrate on my food’ as she put it. Stories were a constant. Books were my companions when I had no friends and escaped to the school’s library, and they were my companions on holiday when the adults enjoyed the sun, and I hid away inside.

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I started writing at a young age, and I remember hand fashioned bound booklets I crafted for it. Back then I wanted to write historical adventures about pirates and corsairs and heroes who would have a swashbuckling adventure. Somewhere, tucked at the corners of memories, that story still exists–enough anyway that I can remember the shape of it. And although I have stepped away from wanting to write historical, the desire to write, to craft adventures out of imagination and words never left me.

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I often say that I write because, really, I never had a choice. Stories have danced in my head since I can remember. Be it for my toys or my eyes alone scribbled as a teen inside a diary, I have always made-up worlds. Now I hope these worlds will be read by others. And although I no longer crash my bicycle into ditches because I’m lost in my own worlds, stories still live just as surely in my blood and soul as they do in my head.

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I hope that my work will become to someone, one day, like the books I read in my childhood; kindling a love for stories that nothing in the world can ever extinguish.