Please
welcome, Gloria Alden, my Wednesday guest blogger. Gloria
writes the Catherine Jewell Mystery series: The
Blue Rose, Daylilies for Emily’s Garden, Ladies of the Garden Club. The Body in
the Goldenrod, as well as a
middle-grade book, The Sherlock Holmes
Detective Club. Her published short stories include “Cheating on Your Wife
Can Get You Killed” winner of the Love is Murder contest, “Mincemeat is for
Murder” and “The Body in the Red Silk
Dress” in Bethlehem Writers Roundtable, “The Professor’s Books” in Fish Tales, “The Lure of the Rainbow” in Fish
Nets, “Once Upon a Gnome” in Strangely
Funny and “Norman’s Skeleton’s” in All
Hallows Evil. She lives on a small farm in NE Ohio with assorted critters:
her collie, Maggie, two house cats, a canary, two old African ring-necked
doves, two ponies, and six rather old hens, plus one loud guinea fowl. She
blogs with Writers Who Kill on Thursdays.
http://writerswhokill.blogspot.com/
Website: www.gloriaalden.com.
I am a writer. I write poetry and mysteries.
Although I’ve been writing for over thirty years – not counting my teen years –
I only started calling myself a writer when my first story. “The Professor’s
Books,” was published in the first Guppy Anthology, Fish Tales. Before that I labeled myself wife, mother, Girl Scout
leader, teacher, etc., but not a writer.
The first time I had
something published was the year I started college as a non-traditional student.
My first English professor encouraged me to submit an essay I’d written in
class to the ICON, a twice-a-year
Trumbull Campus literary magazine of Kent State University. It was an emotional
piece, “Saying Good-bye,” about the death of John, my eighteen-year-old son,
from cancer the year before. I received many positive comments about it which
encouraged me to start submitting poetry.
From then until I
graduated, I had at least one if not more poems in each issue of ICON, and I won The Virginia Perryman
award for freshman writers covering all of KSU for a short story I entered, but
I still did not call myself a writer.
When I entered college as
an older student, I was unsure how I’d do. It had been twenty-five years since
I’d graduated from high school. However, I thrived. I loved the academic world
and was that eager student at the front of the class. Well, maybe not so much in
the math and physics classes I took. After that first semester, I always took
extra classes, and almost all of them were literature, poetry or writing
classes. I was that odd student who loved writing; term papers, poetry,
research papers, whatever. Even though my professors liked what I wrote, it
didn’t necessarily mean I was a writer.
When I graduated, I
became a third-grade teacher. I loved it but missed the academic life so I went
on to get a Masters. Fortunately at that time, I was able to get it in English
and didn’t have to pursue something relating to elementary education. Again I
was in my element; reading, researching and writing. I’m still not sure how I
did it because as a teacher, I always went above and beyond what was necessary.
It was probably on very little sleep. In those years I was a teacher, and that
was the only way I saw myself, not as a writer.
Sometime after I got my
Masters, I started my first book, a cozy mystery with a gardening theme since
gardening is one of my other passions. I’d planned to write a mystery for some
years, but I procrastinated, until my sister, Elaine, came up with the idea
that together we should write a book. We worked on it as a team in the
beginning. However, since we don’t live near each other, before more than a few
chapters were written, I took over the writing. It took several years, but I
finished The Blue Rose. But since it
wasn’t published, I still didn’t consider myself a writer, only a wanna-be.
Off and on for the next
ten years or so, I sent out query letters, and with each rejection, I’d stop
sending out query letters for several months or longer before starting up
again. But I didn’t stop writing. I finished a second book in the series, Daylilies for Emily’s Garden, a middle-grade
mystery, The Sherlock Holmes Detective
Club, and went on to write two more books in my Catherine Jewell Mystery
Series: Ladies of the Garden Club and
The Body in the Goldenrod. I’m now
working on my fifth in this series, Murder
in the Corn Maze, and have lots of ideas for more books.
Those small successes of
having short stories accepted encouraged me finally to self-publish that first
book. I felt even more like a real writer at the launch of The Blue Rose when I sold and signed copies. Being asked to join
the Writers Who Kill blog several years ago was also a validation that I was a
writer.
Many people think about
becoming writers without pursuing it. We’ve all heard people say “I could write
a book if . . .” and then come the excuses. I think many writers need some
catalyst to actually get them started down that path. For me, it was the death
of my oldest son. Only those who have lost a child can understand the pain.
Over the years I’ve written well over thirty poems for John. I plan on putting
them together with a few essays I’ve written into a book. There are several
ways to deal with that kind of death; one is to spend your whole live grieving
and another that I chose: to do something positive that makes a difference not
only in my life, but others. I chose to become a teacher, and it was one of the
best choices I could have made to help the healing. The writing just kind of
worked its way into my healing process. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think of
him often, but I’m content and happy in my life as a writer.
