I’m a writer of course!

I've always loved words. It was magical to me how letters and words could join forming thoughts. I enjoyed playing with these magical things in word puzzles, letter jumbles and books, especially books.

With a book in my hand, I could have fun even when there was no one to play with. Adventures awaited me in every book, sailing over the oceans with pirates, flying through the air as a bird, being a warrior in a mythical land and listening as animals spoke! My imagination came alive with the characters in books. In my imagination Pete the Magic Dragon was real and lived in my closet, and the spiders in my back yard could talk just like in Charlotte’s Web! I was never bored again!

My imagination grew with me. As a child in Pinckard, Alabama I imagined houses made of fluffy fall leaves and giant tree houses complete with a bathroom! Later as a teenager going to school in Swain County, North Carolina, I fell in love with the mountains and the forest around me. I wondered what magical creatures might live within the fairy like land. In my imagination water fairies played in the waterfalls and slept on beds of moss. Cherokee legends about “Little People” living in caves amongst the mountains only fueled my imagination. Were elves and fairies real? Were they peering at me through the trees?

In college, I continued to use my imagination by daydreaming. I studied great authors and marveled at their work. How did they do it? The people, creatures and places writers dreamed of and wrote about were fascinating. I took a class in creative writing, and my teacher Mr. Feagan inspired me. I learned to write using my imagination and turn my daydreams into stories. Short stories and poetry were my favorite. I wanted to be a writer and sell my stories, but life distracted me from my dream.

Years later my mother-in-law requested I write a fairy tale for her. Fairies still fluttered in my mind from my childhood, so I agreed to write it for her. After all, a fairy tale is short, my specialty.

I began the fairy tale, and it grew. My imagination took over. The characters were real in my mind. The fairy realm was a real place, and the story became much larger than a simple fairy tale. The book, Dragon Child emerged from my imagination to surprise even myself!

Now I live and write in Miami, Florida, where I continue to search for fairies in my butterfly garden.