I wanted to write almost as soon as I learned to read. I would stand at our old Royal manual typewriter, the keyboard at my chin level, painstakingly picking out words on the keys. The first thing I tried to write was a dictionary. Even then, I was entranced by words and the worlds they created when you read them. I was driven to craft something—anything—with words.
When I was 6, I told my mother that I wanted to live in the country, travel around the world, and write stories about both. For seventeen years, I lived in the woods, traveled, and wrote about country living and fishing and hunting across the US and beyond. Those years produced a lot of good adventures, some I’ve written about and some I haven’t.
But then life turned, as it does, and I was forced to leave the country and stop traveling. As the newly single mother of an 8-year-old, I needed to be where I could make a living, and my son needed to be where he could go to good schools.
Now, 26 years later, life has come full circle for me. In a couple of months, my husband Rick and I will be going back to the country. Our destination is Sunday Bluff, a tiny community in the Ocala National Forest in central Florida, east of Ocala and close to Fort McCoy and Salt Springs. I have no doubt that new adventures await us there.
Over the years, another thing that changed was the freelance magazine market. Back in the Dark Ages (late 90s to maybe 2010) I had all the freelance writing I could do and I made a decent living. But with the move to digital magazines and the rise in “influencers” (what does that even mean?), many print publications have died and most of the markets I wrote for have vanished.
So, along with this move comes a change in my writing. I’m still doing a few freelance pieces, but I’m also playing with fiction. At the moment I’m working on a science fiction novel, and I have several other projects lined up for as soon as I’m finished with the novel. I’m also looking forward to finally getting my lapidary set up at our new place, and having more opportunity to get the dogs into the field.
And I think it’s finally time to tell a lot of the stories that I’ve never written about. We had some wild times back in the day, some of them funny, some of the scary, all of them worth telling. So, pull up a log, or a chair, or even a bale of hay, and sit around the fire with me.
Welcome to Sunday Bluff Stories.
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