I have an aversion to water slides. Crazy I know, but the steeper and longer the more the fear. Probably stems from the time I went down the slide that seemed so innocently easy. By the time I discovered just how steep the last drop was, it was too late. Let’s just say there was a yard sale for sunglasses, a hat and my pride at the bottom pool. The poor lifeguard wasn’t sure what to do. Help someone old enough to be her mother collect her stuff after she helped me find the surface or watch the next victim, I mean swimmer, come down the slide.  Somehow, she managed to do both.

So fast forward a year to our long weekend in Tucson this past summer. The resort pool had a water slide. So if you saw the woman in the black and white bathing suit hyperventilating near next to the entrance of the waterslide, that would have been me. Didn’t help that both my kids ran past me fast enough to cause a dust devil to appear.

“Come on, Mom. Let’s go.” My son grabs at my hand.

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I’ve been in this business over twenty years. I don’t admit that to just anyone, mind. But I know you won’t tell anybody. To be perfectly frank, while I have spent my time doing careful research on the market and trying my best to keep up, things have recently sped right by me like a bullet train, while I sat on my plow horse.  I don’t want to think it’s my age that makes me less capable of keeping up. I think it’s the chaos that’s too much.

As anybody from the good old days can tell you, it was enough to write a good book. How many times have you heard that? And actually, there was merit to the cliche. Oh, we knew we could help our case if we made bookmarks or took out an ad in Romantic Times. Give-aways were a wonderful thing. And book signings. If you could do a booksigning, you were golden.But it always came down to the work, and those who lost that message in the bright lights of publicity usually didn’t last.

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Photo Credit: Beckett Gladney

Tell us a little about your background.

I’m a freelance writer and illustrator. I’ve had one book published (The Writer’s Online Marketplace, w/Writer’s Digest Books) and have had short fiction and nonfiction pieces published in print as well as online publications. I’m the daily publishing news columnist for Writersmarket.com, have a blog for writers at INKYGIRL.COM: Daily Diversions For Writers, and am currently working on novels for young people. I’m represented by Ginger Knowlton at Curtis Brown Ltd.

Have you always practiced art and writing?

I’ve always enjoyed writing and art, but went to school for Computer Science because I wanted a financially secure job. Worked as a programmer-analyst for two years before leaving the corporate life and hurling myself into the arts.

What inspired you to start the “Will Write for Chocolate” comic strip?

I had been doing one-panel writing cartoons for my Inkygirl site but decided to try an ongoing strip about writers and the writing life. I wanted to choose a cartoon strip theme that hadn’t already been done to death online.

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The science of birth order – or pseudo-science, according to its detractors – has always fascinated me.  Does your position in your family – oldest, middle child, youngest, or only child – affect your personality, your decision-making, your education, your career and even your marriage?

The topic has been under discussion in one of my email groups recently – seems it’s a subject on which everyone has  a view because, well, everyone has a birth order. There are enough people claiming to be “typical” of their birth order to suggest there’s something to it. I’m a big fan of The New Birth Order Book, by Kevin Leman, which delves into the subject in a somewhat self-indulgent way (I write here as a driven, perfectionist oldest child about Dr. Leman, who is a youngest child and therefore typically self-indulgent…though, chances are, that’s not how he would describe himself).  Reader-author birth order politics aside, it’s a great book.

I bought it originally to help me understand why what worked in parenting my oldest child didn’t begin to make a dent in the psyches of my middle and youngest children. Of course, I enjoyed it for the thorough self-analysis it allowed, too (yes, that’s self-indulgent, but who can resist?). Then it occurred to me the book had some application to my work. Read more…