Origins Blogfest

Today I’m taking part in the Origins Blogfest, so I get to tell you where my writing dream began.

Well, it goes something like this:

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Since today won’t be a strict Others have said day, I get to cheat a little. See, the as much as I love reading, the above quote actually applies to me better if it referred to creating stories.

My love for stories is in my blood. By the time I was born, my gran had written and published and/or saw on t.v. a multitude of stories in my first language. So when I played with my cousin (with whom I grew up), we created stories. And characters. And plots. And descriptions.

When I was taught to read and write, my cousin and I started writing silly little books with single words per page that meant something to us. As we grew older, the play-acting continued, but we went our seperate ways when it came to writing. Still, there were few competitions (mainly poetry) that we didn’t enter and win. I think I was nine when I tried to write my first movie script.

The one thing I did not lack was ambition.

The movie script (as happens with nine year olds) lost it’s appeal to me, but in middle school, a wonderful thing happened to me.  I was required to write essays for two languages. At first, it was harsh going, but after my gran explained the basics, I started getting A’s for my efforts. And I fell in love with the chance to record the dozen-a-day ideas I had milling around in my brain.

Still, as I continued to grow older, I got this keen sense of dissatisfaction. I started arguing with my teachers. Because my stories wouldn’t fit into the word count stated. Other kids in my class tried to haggle the word counts down. I begged the teacher to give me more. I mean: who the hell can write an entire deep, complex story in 250 plus minus 10%? Were they kidding me?

That was when I started to think about just writing away from school. Fact was, school writing fixes were to small.

So sometime this month, ten years ago, I opened my first word document and started typing just for the hell of it. And I never looked back since. 

More about my Gran

Hey all!

Sorry for the late post. I’m still running around like a mad person trying to do everything that everybody suddenly expects of me. Anyway…

Welcome and thank you to all of the new followers. I hope you all enjoy the blog.

Finally, I have won two more awards, which I will get to as soon as possible as well as the one that I have not forgotten, but have been unable to get to. Thanks so much for my awards. They really brighten up my day.

Oh wait. Really finally. Sorry for my silence recently on your blogs, but I haven’t been able to read as many of them as I would like to.

With that said, one to the new post.

I’ve gotten many requests to tell you more about my Gran, so I’m left wondering where I would begin.

Hmm…

She was born at the start of WWII, and still remembers how her mother cried on VE day.

For a large part, she’s the one that triggered my love for our history, with stories of the Boer War and the Great Trek.

She’s the one that taught me how to bake cookies. And paint beautifully.

She’s the one that would always see the absolute best in everything I do. Makes her a pathetic critic, but a genius at encouragement.

She’s the one that pointed me to writing.

I love her so very much. She’s a great lady. She’s one of the people I know who has the most faith in God. In a way, she was pretty involved in me meeting Him when I was young.

I say “in a way” because the Holy Spirit tends to be pretty directly involved in these things.

What else can I say?

Almost forty years ago, school teacher asked her to write a book for her first grade class. That book was published and translated to English (she wrote in Afrikaans). She’s been writing ever since.

She knows some of our most famous authors personally and sometimes publishes with them in anthologies. But every time she points out how nice one is, I tend to be surprised, since she never name drops. In fact, few people know that she is an author, simply because she just doesn’t tell them.

She’s cursed with my inability to be understood by others, although she is much more resigned to it than I am. Maybe it came with age. Or maybe because she is much more patient than I am.

I’m hoping she makes it to the birth of my children one day. She was such a great part in my life that I fear that her absence would really be sad.

So that’s bits of her. She’s actually a lot more, but for some reason, I struggle to find the words. Maybe because she is so much more to me than my words can describe.