Post with a Shameless Cliff-Hanger ....

Since I'm sure many of you have been tossing and turning at night, wondering why I haven't had the desire to write lately, I thought I'd address it.

I've always found it curious when people got to college and said they "didn't know what to study." For one thing, that is a hell of a lot of money and time to be spending when you don't exactly know why you're there. But more to the point, I could never understand it because I always had the opposite problem.

When I was in third grade, I dimly remember being given a school assignment to write a story called "What I Would Say if Snowmen Could Talk." (And I distinctly remember my father pointing out that it should be titled, "What I Would Say if Snowmen Could Listen." Well, what can you expect from a South Jersey public school?)

I no longer have this story, and do not remember what, in fact, I would have said if snowman could talk (or listen). But I do remember writing it and thinking, with an unusual clarity and certainty for an eight year-old, "I'm going to be a children's writer when I grow up."

This clarity and certainty continued and, when I was ten years old, I actually wrote a rough draft, then typed up as a 45-page manuscript (yes, on a typewriter!), asked a neighbor friend to illustrate it for me, and mailed it to Dell Yearling Publishers.

Why Dell Yearling? Why, because I had a copy of Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret -- I still have it, and it has the cover torn off, is permanently curled, and has Various Food Stains on it -- and Dell Yearling was the publisher, and their address was on the copyright page.

At age ten, I didn't know enough about the publishing industry to even enclose a SASE. So, really, it would have been fair for Dell Yearling to have thrown it in the trash and go on about their day. If they were feeling particularly generous that day, I could picture them paying the postage to return the manuscript and send me a form rejection letter

So it rather is quite stunning, in retrospect, that they took the time to send me (and my illustrator friend) a personalized letter, saying that it "had potential" and other encouraging things I can't remember at the moment. They also sent me a list of periodicals (like Stone Soup) that publish children's work.

Without boring you too much with details, I was thirteen when I had my first story published, I won a school-wide, then county-wide writing contest when I was fifteen, and I was the front page editor of my high school newspaper my senior year. Surely my Snowman Epiphany when I was eight was no passing phase.

Yet ... a college friend I recently found thanks to Facebook [Shelley] recently said to me, "Oh, I never knew you liked to write."

What?? How can this be, you ask? Wasn't I avidly writing in college? Where did I go wrong? What happened?

Ah ... the same thing that is happening now, and if you haven't figured it out already, you will have to wait for Part Two to find out the answer ....