As a child my defense mechanism against pain was to go inside my head and tell myself stories. I would take myself out of the situation and into one of my favorite television shows. There I would write my own episodes with my favorite characters. Some of my “scripts” would be dark or sad so I thought something was terribly wrong with me.
Just the same, I enjoyed my guilty pleasure. In school I was known as a daydreamer. It was true. I missed plenty of lessons even when I sat at my desk.
When I grew up, married and had a family of my own I found myself spending less time inside my head. Then my mother passed away in July 1981. Again I coped by detaching and “writing” a script.
A die-hard MASH fan for years, I discovered fan fiction on a site about seven or eight years ago called bestcareanywhere.net.
Although some of the stories were ridiculous, I found a couple that I really enjoyed. I began to spin a story in my head that just wouldn’t leave me alone.
A good friend suggested I try my hand at my own fan fiction. My MASH short story, IMPLOSION turned into a 20 chapter novella and after that I wrote a sequel called STRANGE BEDFELLOWS under the pseudonym Bigelow.
Silly as it may sound, this was where I began my writing journey in earnest. I discovered that to make the stories authentic I had to do some research.
Surprisingly, once posted on the site and on another fan fiction site, I got a lot of feedback. Even my husband Jan read them and thought they were great.
They are still up on the website. However, with what I’ve learned about the craft and am still learning, I find them hard to read since they need a lot of work.
As for the cartoon at the top, someone posted it on Facebook and I just had to share it. What writer cannot relate to it? In fact, like the lady on the right, I used details from a tragic incident that was in the forefront of the media a couple of years ago in my novel.
Please excuse me now, I’m going back inside my head. I hear the voices calling.