When did I start writing?
Well, I suppose the real answer to this question begins somewhere in my elementary school days. The only writings I remember are the snail mail letters to my beloved pen pal cousin in Pennsylvania. We wrote about important things like creating our own club, what we were going to wear to the family reunion (matching shirts, same color culottes, white bobby socks, tennis shoes, and pigtails. We were style icons.), and who got to shave their legs first. You know, important things like that.

In high school, my mom homeschooled me and I have vivid memories of writings from that time period. My siblings and I each had a college-ruled spiral notebook and we had to write one page a day. The topic? Anything we wanted. But it always had to be a page long.

The reason I have vivid memories of this time period is that I still have that book from high school. It’s somewhere in storage right now, but I can picture it as if it were sitting right in front of me. Bright blue, with the word “Compositions” inscribed on the front in black magic marker. Underneath that epic title I plastered a sticker of the Pillsbury doughboy. I was very into him in high school, even saving up all the Pillsbury product bar codes to send them in for a Pillsbury doughboy afghan. (I don’t know who uses the word afghan anymore, but I feel like it describes this item better than “blanket.”)

My main memory of those compositions is that I hated writing them. The notebook is full of pitiful writings where I would start off with a decent topic and then run out of things to say halfway down the page. Being the diligent student I was, I would then proceed to write in the looooongest cursive possible (in order to take up a lot of space) and finish out the page with a big messy declaration: “THE END.” The main purpose of writing “THE END” was not to signify the end of the composition because anyone would have realized it was the end if I had written well. The main purpose was to use up more space on the page.

My sweet mother. She deserves a large medal for her work with me.

Needless to say, I am not one of those people who just always knew I wanted to be a writer. Even when I was an adult, I didn’t realize it. A little over 8 1/2 years ago, Jonathan and I moved into a home and I was doing a lot of decorating and cooking on a budget. Jonathan kept telling me I should start a blog and share all these things I was making. So I began Brown Sugar Toast and proceeded to blog three times a week for several years. Somewhere along that time I realized I didn’t like doing projects just to blog about them. And I took some terrible, horrible food photos before I decided not to share recipes anymore. But through it all, I kept writing. And I realized I enjoyed it.

 
(More on this topic tomorrow. My 30 minutes is up and I need to change the sheets.)