Telling Stories

 

            I write stories. That’s what I do and have done since I was a little girl. 

            As you might guess, I also like to read. As far back as my memory goes, my parents and sometimes my grandparents read to me. My dad, who worked long hours at the Swifts Beef Packing Plant in my hometown of St. Joseph, MO, sometimes fell asleep over the storybook.

 I remember some of the Little Golden Books and owned a large collection. I loved fairy tales and poetry and the rhyming rhythm of Dr. Suess. Before I could read, I dictated a story and my mother wrote it down in pink crayon for me. Once I mastered reading, it became a favorite pastime and I devoured books the way most kids do candy. Me, however, I preferred a story to sweets.

I made up stories in my mind. When my grandmother remarried and moved to a different home, the bathroom had high windows so I spun tales about a princess trapped in a high tower. I didn’t just play “House”. I played “Western Days”, house with a historic Western theme.

I also was the child who listened to the elders tell stories. My Granny made the past come alive for me with her memories of  her childhood and family. All of the stories weren’t her own. She told me about how her English born father and Royal Navy veteran once sang for Queen Victorian with other sailors one Christmas. Granny told me how her mother delivered babies in South St. Joe and read the coffee grounds. At a family reunion of my other grandmother’s Lewis relatives, my great-great Uncle Paul Lewis took me aside and told me how the family arrived in St. Joe by covered wagon en route to California but stayed. I enjoyed hearing my parents’ childhood memories and later family legends from my great-aunt Sophie.

By the fourth grade I decided I wanted to be an author when I grew up. In the fifth grade I started writing a novel in the back of my pressed cardboard binder. For each page of text, I drew an illustration. Since by then I read selected adult books, including Gone With The Wind, my story titled Goodbye Dixie had a lot of inspiration from Margaret Mitchell’s classic. It was a childish effort but my father saw potential in the work. A fifth grader who writes a novel might actually write a real one someday.

I wrote in high school and more in college. One of my creative writing professors told me I could become an author but whether or not I did was up to me. After college I went to work at a local small market radio station as an advertising copywriter and receptionist. I began more freelance writing. I sold some articles and a few stories.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties I got serious about writing novels. I had twin toddlers at the time (and would later have another child) so it seemed like an insane time to write but I did. I wrote one novel, then another, and another. I submitted and my first submission, a novel called Kinfolk. A publisher apparently no longer in existence, Champagne Books, accepted it. Evernight Publishing also accepted my tale Wolfe’s Lady.

My first novel debuted in late 2010. As we begin 2026 I have more than sixty novels. My current publishers are The Wild Rose Press, Worldcastle Publishing, and Evernight Publishing.

I’ve signed one contract for the coming year and there will be more.

I submitted my first submission in 2026 on New Year’s Day.

Here’s the blurb and a taste of the story:

Blurb: Luke Castleberry lives in the Ozarks, north of his native Arkansas and far from the bright lights of Nashville.  A decade ago, he topped the charts as Lucian Lake until tragedy derailed his career and life. His best friend is his elderly neighbor, Mavis Nettle, but everything changes when her great-niece Katherine Raleigh moves to the area. Katy is both intelligent and curious. It’s not long before she suspects his former life. Circumstances change and he finds himself center stage once again but as Luke, not Lucian. Will Luke’s love for Katy survive his fame and can they live their happily ever after?

            He’d come a long way from Lower Broad and Tootsie’s. No neon here, no bright lights,  or traffic. No Ryman Auditorium across the way and no music. Nothing but the quiet winter dusk and shadows on the top of an Ozark Hill. Luke Castleberry sometimes passed days without thinking about Nashville. He drove a battered old pickup truck with tattered seats, not a late model Cadillac with chrome and a panoramic sun roof. Well water, cold and clear, quenched his thirst and he had no need or taste left for bourbon. The old guitar Luke had kept sat in his bedroom closet, unused and all but forgotten.

            Nashville had been a daydream, a fleeting moment in his life until the dreams turned to blood-stained dust. The audiences faded away like nightmares in the bright light of day. His two hit songs no longer mattered when his career crashed harder than his car. His fleeting fame vanished into scandal and guilt robbed any pride he had left.

            Look for my ongoing Laredo series chronicling the lives of the Wilson family and more.

            One thing is certain for 2026 – I will tell stories.