Dream So BIG Only God Can Do It I was born in Georgia and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina after moving there at age four. My mom stopped working once my brother and I were born to raise us while my dad was a regional salesman for Clarke Industries. I was fortunate to grow up […]
Be patient with yourself I was a stay at home mom with three children back in 2006. My little business was three years old and it was part-time. I was a professional organizer and saw clients about once or twice a week for a few hours each. I had always loved to write and speak. […]
You will never be younger than you are today I always wanted to write a book, but did not know what to write about. It was always “someday” -someday I would figure it out, someday I would start. What made you decide to finally realize your lifelong dream? In 2011, I was at the point […]
Step out of your comfort zone I was working as an executive director of a nonprofit organization. It was a one woman operation in Muskogee, OK. It started the organization because of my interest in historic preservation. When we lost our major financial supporter, the board of directors could no longer pay my salary. I […]
Cut your own path through the woods I started writing when I came out the womb. One of the first things I learned was how to write creatively. I wrote short stories and poems. A lady told me that I needed to copyright my songs. I didn’t know how to do that. I was 11 […]
Popularizing the structure of creativity I grew up in a creative, entrepreneurial household. Ever since I can remember, certainly by age seven, I was curious about how to come up with a new idea. What were the creative processes/ways to think that would enable someone to create a continuous stream of new ideas? The passion […]
Follow Your Passion Growing up, while I imagined someday writing the great American novel, my mother and the women in my village saw me, chalk in hand poised over a blackboard. Back then, teaching was one of the few career choices available to women in general, and to women of color in particular. I wrote sporadically. […]
Take the pressure off yourself I always wanted to be a writer. In fact, it was one of my earliest dreams. As a child, I wrote stories for my own pleasure, and even unsuccessfully submitted a couple to magazines. Somewhere along the line I went astray. I got an MBA and spent the first part […]
Passion Makes Our Lives Special Ever since 6th grade, when I realized that the musical My Fair Lady had different writers for the original play, the music, the lyrics and the adapted version, I wanted to write a novel that had music associated with it. I wanted to do it all myself. In 2013 at […]
When your desire outweighs your fear… I went to art school in New York and one of our assignments was to create a visual story with no words. I sketched a star falling into the ocean and became a star fish. At that time my daughter was two. I wrote a story to go along […]
Just keep going until you achieve it When I was five years old I began to develop an unusual talent. Sick in bed with chicken pox, I missed an entire week of kindergarten from Monday, February 28 to Friday March 4. How do I remember what the dates were? Because that is the unusual talent. […]
Just be your dream I always wanted to write what I thought was just one novel. I started thinking about this at age 13, when the mother of my best friend put Taylor Caldwell’s A Pillar of Iron in my hand and told me I could write a book like this. I didn’t start writing […]
If you want something, you may have to create it From the time I was ten years old, I felt that my life had been saved because there was something I was meant to do in the world. This was due to three factors; (1) I was born in 1928 only because my mother’s abortionist, […]
Give it your best shot and see what happens I used to work in the medical field selling operating room equipment. Now I’m a writer working on my third book. I always liked writing but I didn’t ever think I would be published. The fact that a publisher thought it was good enough to publish […]
Staying focused on the Lord Since I was ten, my lifelong dream was to be a famous writer. I had dreams of financial wealth and use it for God’s people. At 16 I was pregnant and married. In my mind, I had violated what I saw as God’s Laws. I fell into the trap of […]
It takes a village to do anything… At 66-years-old I got my first book contract, and at age 7o I received the second for Don’t Roll Your Eyes: Making In-Laws into Family. I served three terms in the New Hampshire State Legislature. At 50, I became a professor. It has always been my goal to […]
Take the Leap of Faith For many years I harbored a dream—to write my non-fiction memoir of an extraordinarily difficult small window of time in my life. A time where both I and my family were challenged by fate and death. I battled and won. For years, I wanted to tell the story. I finally […]
I have known I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old I will always be grateful to my third grade teacher, Mrs. Fisher, for instilling the love of writing in me at such a young age. While other kids were out riding their bikes, I was sitting in my bedroom typing […]
If You Don’t Live Your Dream, You’ve Lived Half a Life I grew up in LaHabra, California, an Hispanic neighborhood, but never truly learned to speak Spanish. It was my dream to learn the language and to love the Mexican culture. What made you decide to finally realize your lifelong dream? In the schools where […]
Spreading the Message of HOPE A massive brain tumor snatched part of my hearing and almost took my life in 2006 while pregnant with my fourth child. I was away on medical leave for six weeks in New York City. Days after returning home to my children in Panama City, Panama, my youngest brother committed […]
