What Made Me Want to Write...and keep at it!

I’ll bet everyone else has been asked this question more times than you can count: How and why did you decide to become a writer?
I don’t think it’s actually a conscious decision I made. I have been a reader all my life, since I could string three words together. My mother and sister were both avid readers, and our house was always jammed with books. My sister was more addicted to mainstream, fiction, but my mother loves mysteries, especially if they had a little romance.
So I grew up reading books by Erle Stanley Gardner and Ellery Queen – God, am I dating myself. LOL! And any mystery writer I could get my hands on. My real hero is a woman named Elizabeth Linington who also wrote as Lesley Egan and Dell Shannon. She passed away at 67 but she wrote nearly a hundred books, police procedurals, all of them with personal stories interwoven and I was just addicted to her. I still have all of her books.
But the more I read, the more I had the desire to create something myself. To put pen to paper-or fingers to keyboard-and see if I could become a story teller, too.
Raising a family and working didn’t really leave me the time I want to write but I kept notebooks filled with ideas, clippings, photos that suggested ideas, all the things that I use today to craft plots. And when my husband and I retired and moved to Texas, I thought surely this was the time. Especially when my husband say, “Okay, quit fooling around. Put your butt in that chair and write.”
I was sure, based on my past reading, that I would write a mystery. I even had it all plotted out and a profile for each of my characters (many of them based on people I’d worked with who I thought deserved to be shot or hanged! LOL!
Well, my dears, talk about hitting a brick wall. I wrote three chapters. Then I rewrote them. Then I rewrote them again. By the time two months had passed I never wanted to see those (expletive deleted) chapters ever again in this life or the next. I was ready to through out both my computer and my fledgling writing career.
Then I read a book, and it’s amazing how one book can change your life. I read CRY NO MORE By Linda Howard, and lordy, I was off to the races. I discovered that I craved r/s the way ducks crave water. I started looking for similar authors and pretty soon my budget was shot to hell with book buying.
But I finally realized where my heart lay. I sat down and wrote my first manuscript in two weeks. And let me tell you, it was AWFUL!!!! I, of course, thought I’d written a RITA award winner. What a blow to my ego when no on else thought so.
Although I’ve been very fortunate in my career in a short time, I have yet to sell that first effort. Have just finished the 40th rewrite -no joke-because I think I finally get it.
So if you’re stuck at a point in your writing, or wondering if the success fairy will ever visit you, take heart. She’s waiting right around the corner. Just be sure that what you’re right is from your heart because that’s what works the best.
I don’t think you’ll ever see MURDER AT MASS in print but maybe one of these days you’ll see TARGET, my first romantic suspense and the one that led me to write the others.
And by the way, thank you, Linda Howard.
Stay tuned!
Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from what started life as Run For Your Life.

Prologue
Her hands were slick with sweat, slippery on the wheel. The sound of her heart beating was like a kettle drum inside the car.
Damn it! Get out of the way, she swore at the cars in front of her. Move, move, move.
She could still hear the voices, so cold and mater of fact.
…kill her…kill her…kill her…
And the swooshing of the door to the garage just as she backed her car out, tires screeching. The panic as she listened for another car engine to start.
The tiny silver rectangle was tucked in her bra, it’s touch almost burning her skin. God, if only she hadn’t been so clumsy and knocked those files to the floor. If only she’d been faster down the stairs.
If only…
Shut up, Kathryn, and think. This is no time to fall apart.
There it was now, up ahead. The on ramp to the Interstate. But which way to go? Which way? Which way? She took the northbound ramp, the first one she came to, and lost herself in the lanes of speeding cars.
Ohgodohgodohgod. They’re going to kill me. I have to get away.

Come visit me at:
www.judithrochele.com
www.desireeholt.com
www.myspace.com/judithdesiree