What makes a writer?  We could suggest that a writer is one who is an artist, who loves the written word, who seeks to educate and enrich others….or maybe a writer is just somebody who likes to fabricate new truths.  My parents are packing up their house and moving back to Florida.  We lived in Miami when I was a child and when my parents decided to move us to Cincinnati, my dad went first to get settled with a job.  My mother and the four children: me, Ricky, Michael, and Timothy all stayed behind to finish out the school year and sell the house.  My mother encouraged us to write our father often.  Last night, they gave me a box of my report cards, artwork, and letters.  In this particular letter  I’m informing him, as only a a six year old girl can, that all of my brothers are bad and I am good.  Oh, and by the way, let my cousin Sheila know that I’m coming soon.  I laughed so hard, I cried.  Even as a child, I was manipulating the truth to suit my needs.  I mean, how was he going to know the difference?  If I wrote that my brothers were being bad but I was good, why wouldn’t he believe that?  The power of the written word is infallible.  Maybe some of us are just born to fabricate; we love to write about the world as we see it or even just as we wish it would be.  I like to think that I now have in my possession my very first short story.