I don’t remember deciding to become a writer.  You decide to become a dentist or a postman.  For me, writing is like being gay.  You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away–Mark Haddon

I started writing when I was eleven years old.  We had just moved to a new neighborhood and I had no friends, no woods to play in, nothing to do.  The only excitement about moving was the pool in our backyard which my father promptly had removed because he discovered a leak in the liner.  It was the worst summer of my life.  I began writing in a spiral notebook and hid them from my three brothers, two of which loved tormenting me.  As time went by, more notebooks filled.  I made friends, I became involved in activities, but I continued the secret life of a writer.  Even when I married, I didn’t tell my husband about all of my hidden notebooks.  Eventually he figured it out and was probably relieved that I wasn’t hiding a secret affair.  I was just a secret writer.  Studies have shown that the age of a first-time published author is around 42.  We could blame the intricate and impossible world of publishers, we could say that life experience makes you a better writer, we could say that only people in their forties (and older) have the time to write.  For me, it was the time in my life that I started accepting who I really was and lost the fear of exposing myself to the world.  An old friend of mine lost his wife suddenly to cancer and I began thinking of my “hidden” novels on my computer.  What if I died tomorrow?  Writing was so important to me and I was so proud of my work–what if I died and no one but me ever knew that I was writer?  My husband didn’t even know my passwords to open them up and publish them posthumously.  So, I took a deep breath and came out of the secret writer’s closet, holding my spiral notebooks (symbolically).  For better or for worse, I am a writer.  Don’t run away.