Sparked! A blogfest.

Get your sparkage on with the Sparkfest hosted by Christine Tyler. It runs until the 26th, so there is still time to sign up.

The blogfest questions are:

What book made you realize you were doomed to be a writer?

What author set off that spark of inspiration for your current WiP?

Or Is there a book or author that changed your world view?

I started writing for fun when I was much younger, but it wasn’t until recently that I started writing seriously. And it is completely the fault of my friend Marie.

A few years ago Marie gave me a three-ring binder neatly filled with type-written pages.

Marie and me at 14-years-old:

She’s the one sporting the wicked camera. Yes, we still both look that young and beautiful.

So--she pressed the binder into my hand all serious and nervous.

“I wrote a book.” she said. “Will you read it?”

I asked her when she had time to write a book--with having twin boys less than a year ago.

“Nap time,” she said, like it was the easiest thing in the world to whip out a novel between diapers and tummy time and fractured nights.

Marie’s book, now contained by a binding instead of a binder:

And I thought--if she can write a novel during nap time, then surely I, with summers off due to my teaching gig, could manage to spew out a novel. I’d tried to write them before but always wandered away. Mostly because I spent a lot of my 20s doing this (well, and going to college and grad school on occasion too):

So I started doing this instead:

In between moments of this:

How could I not post such awesomeness?

All because Marie said I could do it, and Marie is usually right.

So I did it--I wrote a novel. And then I did it again. And again. And then the writing obsession started.

Consider me sparked.

How did you get sparked?

Go back to the linky here!