Why did I become an author?

I am an author. Why? Well, I’m not entirely sure how it started or why it did. All I can be sure of is that writing has been a part of my life since I first learned how to string the letters of the alphabet together in a way that made possible an argument that allowed me to get the things I wanted. Sometimes what I wanted was just a bedtime story to help me sleep. Sometimes it was a demand I needed met by my parents in order to stop me from crying. Other times i needed it to facilitate an emotional purging that helped me to cope with whatever circumstance I found myself in that time, that was otherwise debilitating my progress through life.

Writing is therapy, writing is medicine, writing is my escape.

As such, being a published writer has long since been a dream of mine. Since my fourth grade year, when I bargained with the teacher to allow me to skip a class assignment if I could instead write a full length book of poetry, it’s been a back-of-the-mind dream. That same book, once completed, went on to be read to the principal who then read it to the school during assembly. That first experience showed me that perhaps, if I could interest my teacher, the principal, and thus the entire school into what I had to say, maybe I had something worth listening to. This theme continued throughout my schooling and into my adult life. Writing always at the forefront of my private interests, but never a priority.

The fateful year of 2020, anyone who lived through it will tell you it was one of the most challenging. We were all scared. We listened to the news tell us how we were all close to death and our leaders were lying to us. The pandemic kept us all inside and away from one another. Some of us died, yes, and still some denied any thing was happening at all.

It was in this state of panic that I turned to my old confidant, my pen and paper, and used them as tools to help me cope with the horrendous nature of what was happening to our world. I became an author because it was the only thing I knew I could do for myself that would save me from the world that was seemingly imploding in on all of us, at the time.

Writing is my salvation, and I finally have something to show for it. I have Glow Girl. My debut novel about a young women whose youth escapes her when she decides to give it to a boy who doesn’t deserve any of it. She loses herself in him and in the poor choices she makes in name of him, and grapples with the reality of where she’s left in the end.