Into the Night

   So, I just got back from a trip home to the East Coast, and with every day that passes, I’m more convinced I should never have come back.

   You see, I’m a small-town kind of girl.  I grew up in the world’s back yard, a military brat with all of Europe to explore.  And I loved it.  But I was never one for the tourist traps or large cities.  Give me a small, rural town full of color and character - someplace that still radiates the true history of a nation.  For all the years I lived in Europe, I was surrounded by small towns and rural stretches of field and forest, and I loved it all.

   When I moved back to the US in the late 90s, my first stop was a small town in rural Pennsylvania.  Sure, I had my problems with the town, but that was mostly in the narrow-mindedness of some of its inhabitants.  But I loved the area, with its open fields, forests, and streams.  There’s just something so pure and whole about nature as seen in small towns.

   Several years ago, I got married, and moved from rural PA to urban Arizona.  It’s been a daily struggle for me, here, to adapt to the lack of forests, the lack of grass, and more than that, the lack of everything I call home.  Big cities are far from where I belong.  Too full of noise and bustle, and everyone running around but going nowhere.  My health’s declined since moving into this environment, and I long for the forests and fields - for the nature I left behind when I came here.

   Since my recent visit back East, I’ve decided that’s where I belong.  It may take me a few years to get there, but like Dorothy in Oz, I’m heading home the first chance I get.

For now, since I don’t have a guest (wouldn’t be fair to anyone, since May’s almost over), I thought I might talk about how I got started writing (that seems to be a popular question).

To be honest, I can’t remember a time when I WASN’T writing.  When I was about two years old, I can remember getting in trouble because I scribbled lines of loops and swirls through the pages of one of my parents’ books.  I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong, at the time, because in my head, when I was making those squiggles, I was telling myself a story about fantastic creatures and great adventures. 

The hunger for written words was a big spur forward for me.  When I was three, I taught myself the alphabet, and then to read.  It was a painful process (and not just for me…lol… I bugged everyone I could find for help if I couldn’t sound out a word, or it didn’t make sense when I did), but I was determined to learn to read and write.  I had so many stories inside of me, clamoring to get out.

The first full story I ever read was a children’s version of the epic legend of Beowulf.  And I was hooked…lol.  I followed that with the story of Gawain & the Green Knight, and my love of Medieval history and Arthurian Legend took firm root.  But I wasn’t about to stop with reading.  The more I read, the more I wanted to write and create.

By the time I reached Kindergarten, at the age of five, I had a rudimentary understanding of writing (not that my penmanship was any good!).  By the end of that year, however, I’d gleaned enough to be able to string sentences together, and I was in the running.  But I had a problem.  While I had all these stories trapped in my head, I wasn’t sure how to get them out, properly.  I’d never attempted to write more than a few sentences, and none of those strung together.  I was getting frustrated, and fast.  I nearly gave up on the idea of writing after an injury to my left hand (yes, I’m left-handed) prevented me from participating fully in the lessons that would give me a place to start.

The credit for getting me to actually start writing stories goes to my third-grade teacher, to whom I will always be grateful.  He gave me a challenge - choose one inanimate object, and write a paragraph from its Point-Of-View.  *grins* By the time I was done, I had a whole story out, and suddenly, everything clicked open.  I knew exactly what to do. 

The next few years, I wrote a bunch of small, short stories for children (none have ever been published - they were very rough draft, and not great, but they were excellent teaching tools).  Then, in fifth grade, I decided what I really wanted to do was write my own interpretation of Arthurian Legend.  I’d been reading it for years, by then - everything I could get my hands on, from the Mabinogion, to Monmouth, to Mallory and beyond, and everything in between.  So I started researching.  And I started writing.

Is this interpretation complete?  No.  To this day, I’m still working on it.  I hope to someday have it completed and available for publication.  But several years into working on it, I changed gears and started writing another series (actually, it started out as a single book), based in a futuristic world, but with characters and some situations that were drawn out of my own life at the time.  These books would eventually become The Underground, a futuristic series I first had e-published in 2004 (currently, it’s looking for a new home).  And the rest, as they say, is history. 

 For anyone interested in being my Guest Author for a month, there are still a few openings for the late Fall and Winter this year left, and I’m willing to book ahead into next year, as well… please visit
http://www.esthermitchell.com/GuestAuthor.html for more information!

For anyone interested in finding out more about what I have available currently, please visit http://www.esthermitchell.com/Availabletitles.html  or, if you’re interested in buying, visit:
Project Prometheus #1: IN HER NAME
http://www.aspenmountainpress.com/in-her-name/prod_73.html