How the Journey Began

Just a little context about me before we delve into my life-long journey as a writer….  

I’m a queer, middle-aged, non-binary, cis woman with European and indigenous ancestry (Cherokee and Chickahominy). I’m pretty introverted with a very recognizable laugh. My day job is in themed entertainment, which means I get to ride roller coasters at work both figuratively and literally. I live in my hometown of Los Angeles and am the third generation of mom's family to work in the entertainment industry here. It all started with my great-aunt who was a stunt woman in Hollywood and stood in for Faye Ray in the original King Kong film.

Some of my favorite things include visiting haunted houses and graveyards, researching creepy and weird stuff, and traveling to interesting places. I once caught an EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) on the HMS Queen Mary - something I thought was complete b.s. until it happened to me, but that’s a story for another time.

My writing journey began as soon as I was asked to put pencil to paper. As the legend goes, according to my mother, I wrote my first play when I was six years old. It was something that ended up becoming a school Christmas play. To be honest I have no memory of doing this. Not to mention my mother was prone to telling tall tales, so this one may or may not be true.

I do know for certain I was dabbling with fan fiction around the time of junior high. No one saw it but me and for some reason I was hell-bent on writing in dialog as opposed to prose. So maybe there’s a kernel of truth in the first-grade play origin story.

My taste in literature and history altered drastically in high school and I became extremely drawn to theater, particularly Shakespeare. My first paid job was doing backstage work, including lighting and set installation, for the semi-professional choir I was part of at my Catholic church. We did a couple of concerts a year and even an NBC Christmas special. At school I performed in a stage musical my senior year.

For college I attended California Lutheran University, a quiet liberal arts school north of L.A. I started studying English in the hopes of becoming a high school teacher, but then I got sucked into the university theater department. Before I knew what was happening I was double majoring in Theater and English with a concentration in playwriting.

I wrote a one-act and a full-length play, which the theater department both insanely produced. I say insanely because the one-act was about Jack the Ripper, and the main character ended up literally stalking the audience by the end of the play. Up until that moment folks sat on the edge of their seats as the drama unfolded. But once Jack turned his knife toward them, they all reflexively sat as far back in their seats as they could, much to my delight every night it ran.

The full length was about the relationship between Princess Elizabeth Tudor and Queen Mary I, who during her reign locked up her young sister in the Tower of London. That play went on to compete in the regionals of the American College Theater Festival and had a decent review in the Los Angeles Times. With those successes under my belt, I became a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. A playwright was born, and I thought I was off to the races.

But then cold, hard reality set in. Being a writer and working in the theater pretty much paid poverty wages, if I got paid at all. For a while, I did the whole three job thing, but that got to be exhausting.

After getting four plays produced regionally, a monologue published in More Monologues for Women by Women, and making next to no money, I was getting frustrated with my theater pursuits. I thought maybe branching out to screenwriting might help, so I took a class at my local state college. Soon I was churning out spec scripts, screenplays, and TV pilots. I even adapted a friend’s book and got a first look agreement with a producer. And… nothing really happened. I was writing a lot and at times felt I was making some traction but again not making much money from all the long hours I was putting in. I was told I was good and had interesting ideas, but what I was writing wasn’t marketable right then. The timing was never right.

By chance I got sucked into themed entertainment. What is that, you ask? The wonderful and utterly crazy world of designing and running theme parks. I ventured into the design part, which meant I was finally using my degree in my day job, albeit not in script writing, but in all other aspects of project design. It also meant my writing fell to the wayside because I was way too exhausted from learning my new gig to do anything creative when I got home. I also got married and bought a fixer upper house, so my stage carpentry skills were being put to good use on the weekends.

Life shifted into something else and that was okay. Periodically I would toy with the idea of self-publishing something now that it seemed easier to do. You have to remember when I first started writing in my late teens home desktop PCs were relatively new, laptops didn’t exist at all, and the internet was still in beta testing. Submitting any creative writing anywhere meant you had to look through trade papers for query leads, find a computer someplace, print out the play on a dot matrix printer, take it to Staples to make a copy, then snail mail it with a self-addressed and pre-paid postage return envelope. It was an expensive, time consuming, and difficult process.

By the 2010s, everything was very different in terms of submissions and publishing. Perhaps it was time to try something different. Could someone who was exclusively a script writer switch gears and try writing a novel?

One particular script kept tugging at me, something I wrote as a TV pilot that took place in Salem, MA. It was about a young woman, who didn’t know anything about her ancestry, moving to Salem after inheriting her great-aunt’s home. When she arrives, she finds a mysterious cabinet in the cellar of the house and discovers the town is full of witches. It was a barebones entry into a much larger story that kept calling to me.

I toyed with the idea of turning it into a novel and started compiling research notes, crafting outline beats, and rejiggered my characters, but I just didn’t have time to really focus on it. Then Covid hit. I got put on furlough at my job. Suddenly I had time to focus on this writing project and didn’t know when I would get such a chance again. I formed the basic idea of what I wanted to do and used the teleplay as a guide to write about nineteen pages. Then I got sent back to work two months into my furlough. Again, I was really busy and couldn’t focus on the book. I felt like I had abandoned the story yet again, but it kept nudging my mind every few months. Weird dreams filled in gaps in my plot. An odd story gave me a different perspective.

In February of 2023 I had a break thru. I don’t remember exactly what triggered it. Maybe it was a song or something someone said. I knew exactly how I was supposed to proceed and the roots of it were embedded in my own memories and experiences. I quickly breathed life into an outline that was way more detailed than the one I originally constructed. By May I had a first draft done. By October I felt comfortable enough with my rewrites and edits to jump into the querying trenches. In June of 2024 I signed a contract with a small publisher, and now I’m in the marketing trenches.

I’ll talk more about researching and writing the book in upcoming blog posts and will share my querying journey and how I landed a publisher. Thanks for accompanying me on this journey.

Check back each month, from now until Whispers of the Pale Witch hits bookshelves, to learn more about myself, my writing process, and how the Beckett Coven series was born. Next month I'll share how I got a publisher.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. Shall we begin?