A Challenge: Blog Each Day In August!

The lovely Natalie Grueninger, co-author of In the Footsteps of the Anne Boleyn
as well as the creator of On the Tudor Trail, has invited bloggers to take part in blogging challenge and write a blog each day for the month of August on 31 topics.  Nat writes, “The aim is to have a bit of fun and be creative”.

The first topic is to write the story of your life in 250 words. Hard one, but I have managed to do it by cheating a little and editing down a longer piece about my life by just focusing on one important aspect: writing!

If you blog, why not join in the fun, too…

I was eight when I knew I wanted to be a writer; two years later, at ten, I won my first poetry competition, the same year a friend gave me a child’s book of English history for my birthday. Powerfully, I connected to one of its chapters, the chapter telling the story of Elizabeth Tudor.

My father devoured books. Once read, he tossed the books into our broom cupboard. I burrowed my way through them: history, philosophy, the complete works of Shakespeare, politics and a few classic novels. My love of reading increased my desire to write.

I met my husband at seventeen, married him at eighteen and had our first child ten months later. I was so young that I believed motherhood meant giving up my writing ambitions. The traumatic birth of my second son awoke me to the fact that writing was part of my being.

Entering University in my early twenties, academic success gave me the confidence to pursue a career in education. I gained employment as a primary teacher and decided to complete a Graduate Diploma in Visual and Performance Arts. The course immersed me in the creative process and opened the floodgates to the novel I had started in my twenties. Words poured out of me and by the end of the course I had finished the first draft of Dear Heart, How Like You This? An American small press publisher published it ten years later.

Writing shaped my life and continues to do so.