Standing at the Trailhead of Winter

Ever since I can remember, I've wanted to be able to call myself a writer. An author. When I was seven and eight years old, I wrote little stories about elves and fairies that lived near a stream. I wrote sappy poems. This continued until seventh grade when I departed from the usual and wrote a very weird story that involved a circus and death via high wire and trapeze. I gave it to my English teacher to read, hoping she'd give me some constructive feedback. That didn't happen. There was feedback, but it was simply "This isn't even plausible." Nothing more. I was disappointed, to say the least. And I stopped writing. Then, when I was in college, I started writing again. I found writing classes to take, both poetry and short fiction. I had one professor write me a note about how he truly enjoyed my poetry. I had another professor tell me one of my short stories was first-rate. They both gave me encouragement and hope that maybe one day I'd see my dream of b...

In December of 2010, I finished uploading my grandma's memoir to a self-publishing site and released it to be sold on Amazon. I had started working on her manuscript around 1994, taking it from her longhand to a word processing program. I'm pretty sure it was Word 3.1, or something like that. Thankfully, I knew enough about saving digital work then to save it in a format that would be compatible to different programs if need be. I completed transferring the manuscript in 1997, printed out all 200+ pages, took it to a copy store, and had several spiral bound copies made to present to my grandma. Her delight in having her book in hand was the only payment I needed. Her happiness made me happy. In 2006, I came across a self-publishing site and decided to take Grandma's book and turn it into a "real" book, a paperback with a "real" cover and its own ISBN. At the time, I didn't have the skills to create a cover, and after several failed attempts, the bo...