My first book was a mystery. A three-paragraph long mystery, but a mystery nonetheless.
I was probably six or seven, and I’m certain that my handwriting still had backwards S’s in it, but my parents remember me coming home from school one day with one of those gray recycled papers with light blue lines on it and proudly presenting them with my mystery novel. It might have been short—and possibly been about a cat?—but it had a beginning, middle, and an end. It was a story.
I don’t know where the idea for writing a mystery came from, although I’m guessing that laying in bed every Thursday night and listening out for the wail of the woman fainting on the PBS Mystery program’s Edward Gory-illustrated introduction was formative. It’s possible too that Mum’s deep love of the crime genre rubbed off on me from an early age.
By 11 or 12, I’d moved on to sweet Kensington Zebra romance novels that featured a handsome couple in Regency dress on the cover, some light flirting for 200 pages, and a kiss in the final chapter. It was innocent stuff, but it was yet another foray into genre fiction.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that growing up my own stories always fell neatly within the bounds of genre fiction. Ideas for romance, fantasy, and mystery would come to me in hot flashes of inspiration. First I scribbled away in notebooks with pens that made me feel all the more grown up because you could not erase mistakes. Then, when Dad upgraded the family computer at the end of my time in high school, I claimed the old desktop and set it up in my room for late-night writing sessions. I would pop in my hard disk to preserve my precious work and fell as though I was achieving something.
Then I went to college. Pushed by professors in a way that I’d never been in high school, all of my time and energy went into plowing through hundreds of pages of history textbooks and assigned novels. My writing time became dedicated entirely to essays and papers of varying lengths. Working on my own fiction was relegated to winter and summer breaks when I wasn’t working. Looking back on it, it doesn’t surprise me that, in this environment of neglect, nothing substantive grew out of the draft languishing on the Dell laptop I’d taken to college with me.
No matter, I thought as I worked my way through my first year of college. I had decided a long time before that I would be a history professor, so that was clearly where I needed to focus my energy. That is, until my first semester of my second year when, while walking out of Burbank Airport next to my mother, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted at all.
“I don’t think I want to get my PhD and be an academic,” I told Mum. “I think I might want to be a journalist.”
“Thank God,” was her reply.1
And so I went from would-be academic to journalist, still neglecting my fiction for another two and a half years of my undergraduate degree. I applied for graduate school in journalism programs and got in to three. I chose the Journalism School at Columbia University, a masters program that moves at break-neck speed, spitting out baby journalists with MS degrees in ten months flat. The school’s location in New York City was definitely the main draw, as was the fact that I could make broadcast journalism (i.e. TV and radio) my concentration.
One of the side effects of this intense degree program was a hereto unknown to me condition called burnout.
We didn’t recognize burnout as such in 2008 because it was talked about in the mainstream so much less, so I wasn’t entirely certain what was the matter with me. I just knew that I felt completely emotional, mentally, and physically tapped. I was also creatively drained in a way I had never been before. I needed a solution and, to my mind, my two options were watching So You Think You Can Dance and other reality TV shows at the end of every night of working on my master’s thesis or trying to write a book.2
I chose the book.
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