So, I signed up for the DIY MFA book club (because apparently I wasn’t already busy enough right now!). Today is day one and the prompt is: how did you become a writer?

I feel like I’ve always been a writer. Or at least, I’ve always thought of myself as one. I wrote a lot as a kid. I loved any and all creative writing assignments at school (there were never enough of them) and wrote on my own as well. I still have some of those early, fragmentary stories.

By the time I was in grade three I had the definite thought that I wanted to write books, but I didn’t have any idea about how to get there.

I read. A lot. All the time. All sorts of things.

As a teenager I went through the not-unusual very angsty poetry phase. But by the time I was in my 20s, I was preoccupied with essay writing for school and only the odd poem or short story.

Then I had children and I was busy with that for a while! But I still read. A lot. And went through various genres, but I’ve always loved mysteries and science fiction the most.

But once the children were both in school all day, I went back to writing and this time far more seriously than I had before. That was just over ten years ago. I started to write (a lot) and to take courses and read writing books and such.

Today, I have a stack of first drafts of novels, along with one that has gone through numerous drafts and edits and is just about ready to submit to agents/publishers (I have a short list and I need to decide soon how I am going to approach this).

I’ve had a handful of short stories published (and one upcoming in an anthology later this year).

I started this part of my writing journey writing literary fiction, but these days I am almost exclusively writing science fiction (intersectional feminist science fiction with a definite literary bent) and I feel like I have (finally) found the right writing spot for me.