Sara Paretsky, justly famous author of the V.I. Warshawski private detective series, said during a talk I attended at my local indie bookstore recently, that she was a writer from childhood. “I always had a story going in my head.”

Me, too. And I’ve heard variants of the same history from every writer I’ve met. Plays, poems, novels, short stories, entire newspapers, journals, comics, memoirs – we can’t help ourselves. From an early age, we’ve got a jones for words. Words are the tools we need to capture and express what imagination, dreams, nightmares, observations, fantasies, desires are storing in our brains. And express them we must. We writers have stories going in our heads, more and more of them over time.

I thought I’d share some of my own grab bag of source material – and what my brain does with it – in my blog, and see if I can entice a few friends from time to time to guest blog with something that’s swimming around in their heads. Maybe it will give other people an indirect answer to the perennial question: “How did you become a writer?”

My blog entries may also make clear the truth of that familiar disclaimer, you know, the one that insists that the characters and situations in this novel are works of fiction and not real people? A specific person, place, painting or overheard comment may set the wheels of imagination in motion. But the rest is just what writers do – the stories in our heads.

WELCOME!

Welcome to my new blog and thanks for stopping in. If you landed here more or less randomly, I hope you’ll stick around for a few minutes, and consider dropping in again from time to time. I should warn you that, like a lot of other writers, my thoughts tend to map a course more like butterflies than English teachers: Oh, here’s an idea…wait, there’s another over there…oooh, I like the cool one beyond the fence….

I’ll try to settle on one at a time and hope I get better at it as I go along. Right now, I’m feeling a bit strange. I’m a fiction writer. I’ve chosen not to write about me – no memoir cries to be released from my personal history, no confessional literature threatens to leak into my protagonist’s back story. But in the blog, I will, necessarily, be speaking from my perspective about things that matter to me. It’ll be my voice, not Dani O’Rourke’s, and I think she may be a lot more interesting (and less revealing of me).

So the first hurdle is to stop cringing at the “I” word, use it as little as possible, and try to bring forward ideas that have some value to blog readers. Having crossed the fence from devoted reader to published mystery writer only recently, I hope I can shine a little spotlight on each part of that community, and maybe even help a few other butterflies sail over the fence.

So, if you’re inclined, please bookmark www.susancshea.com and come back for a visit soon. Thanks!