Was that How it Really Started?

This is one of my acting headshots from 1995. Both my writing AND my face have changed a bit since then.

I’ve done a fair amount of blog interviews this past year, and two just this past week. In all of them, I’ve been touting that I’ve been a published author for 20 years.

It’s a lie.

Yesterday, I went up to the attic to dig out my old clippings in order to find my first published story and do a blog piece about how my writing has changed in 20 years. In doing so, I discovered that my first story was published in 1994 in Catalyst magazine. Apparently, I’ve been published for 21 years.

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I had thought about sharing the story here, but upon reading it after all this time, I decided to spare you that. Despite the title “When the Praises Go Up”, it isn’t a religious story. It’s actually a mini-dystopian and a bit strange. I remember it was based on a dream I had one night. I recall writing much better stuff than this back then, and I wonder what it was about this story and this publication that clicked and earned me $20 and my first byline.

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When doing my interviews, the first publication I had been thinking of was “Wishes From Aphrodite” a poem included in Whispers Magazine in 1995. I am not a poet, although I did a fair amount of songwriting in my teens and twenties. I didn’t write this to be a poem. I submitted these lines to this particular publisher as ideas for a line of inspirational greeting cards. I got a letter back asking if it would be all right to put the lines together and publish them as a poem in their magazine (which I didn’t know existed before submitting). Why not? I thought.

The lovely woman who played the lead in A Pirate Tale, Cathy Gilbert, has an equally amazing husband, Ernie Gilbert (now a multi-Emmy award-winning animator at Nickelodeon), and he drew this super cute picture for our programs.

I have also mentioned in interviews that the first writing for which I got paid was a children’s musical.
A Pirate Tale came to be because an actor friend of mine knew I loved children’s theater and was writing a series of fairy tales*.  He asked if I would write an original fairy tale for his children’s theater company to perform in Los Angeles. A Pirate Tale follows the constructs of a typical fairy tale, but it’s about pirates instead of princes and princesses. It sold out every performance. That was in 1994 as well. In 1995, I followed that show up with another musical called Who Stole the Circus.

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*My senior year in college, I took a literature class on fairy tales. I became obsessed with writing my own. I’ve posted three of them on Wattpad if you’d like to take a look. One of my fairy tales, “Rosewood”, was published by Loveprints Novelettes in 1996. Not the most impressive cover, right? I’m planning to touch the story up a bit, make a prettier cover, and add it to my collection on Wattpad soon.

Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me. I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to leave a comment. If you’re an author too, share when and what your first publication was. In September I’ll be doing a “Back To School” theme, and I have seven wonderful authors scheduled to visit and share school scene excerpts from their YA or MG novels. Hope you’ll come back and check it all out.




My Wattpad romantic fairy tales that you can read for free just by clicking on the title.

Deal

King or Beggar

Voice of Desire

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