Let the adventure begin...

I am a 25 year old nanny that loves to write. I am currently writing a children's book and a teen novel. I started this blog to help build my writing skills. The more you write the better you get right. So this is a little experiment to help diversify my writing skills. I will write about anything and everything from my life to fairy tales to possibly some pages of my books.

So I will start with the easiest to write about...my life. More importantly I will write about my struggles in school and the beginning of my writing dreams. From age 3 my mother knew there was something special about me. I grew up in a little town with only a few stop lights and some cows. My mother always told me stories of the things I would say. Like my third birthday party, when I told my father to please blow out my candle for princesses don't do silly things like that. I was always the talker. I talked about everything i could think of to anyone that would listen. I was fascinated by books from a early age. I can remember sitting in the bottom on my closet surrounded by books. I would lay them out just so and pick each one up so gently to open it up and allow myself to be taken away to the far off lands that awaited me. Now I was not really reading them for I had a extreme learning disability. In school I could read the words out loud at the young age of three but I knew sometime was not right for the words did not make sense. When my mother read to me I could understand the story. My mind understood that the prince ran away with the princess. But when I read it all I got was the picture of a prince, a pair of legs running, and a princess. Nothing was connected. This would baffle me for years to come. My mother could not understand how I could read the book so beautifully but not answer any question about it.

My school being a small town school never tested for any learning disability because I was always so bright and made the honor roll. But as the years went on and testing was more important, my grades slowly went down and began to draw attention to the unknown problem that haunted my early education. It was not until middle school that something clicked and I began to be able to comprehend. I was taught to diagram sentences. This is how I would read. I would quickly scan find the subject of the sentence then the verb and then use all the left over words to help paint a clearer picture. No one ever told me to do this and no one ever knew why my grades began to pick up and I began to read at a level several grades ahead of me.

In high school, I had trouble reading out loud in my AP English class. My teacher kept me after class and I asked me about it. I told her that I could read out loud but I was trying to understand what I was reading by diagramming the sentences at the same time. She asked why. I simply told her that by the time I would get to the third or forth word in a sentence I would have no idea what the first word was. I soon came to find out what this meant. I had a lack of sentence memory. I had a name for my disability but this soon dashed my dreams of ever becoming a writer to all those lovely books that I had dreamed up and were swirling around in my head just screaming to get out.

How could I write a book if my sentences were written oddly because not only did I read differently I wrote differently. I eventually put the dream of becoming a writer out of my head and concentrated on getting into college. Which I am proud to say I soon got accepted to Baylor University. As I started college, I wanted to become a elementary school teacher but soon realized that none of my professor understood my way of teaching. I taught how I learned. I taught through hands on activities and seemed to weed the reading assignments out of my teaching. This did not please my professors and I soon ended up failing some education classes. I then changed majors to child development. I flew through the course with straight A's and much respect from professors.

I then decided that I would take some English classes. After my first day in the English class I feel back in love with both writing and reading. As I turned in paper after paper and received A after A. I soon realized that maybe I could write. What was stopping me...fear. Could I really let that ruin my dreams of writing. So after I graduated I soon started my first two books...and that is where I am today. So my writing is not the best and I may have to go back over every sentence a million times...who care...I can no I will write. It is in my soul and heart. As the words fill my head I just have to get the words on paper to tell my story, to write my own legacy, and to inspire other to follow their dreams.