Welcome to the Literary Chick

You know that cliché about wanting to write since being old enough to hold a pencil? Yeah, that’s me. Six years old, writing stories about Herman - an elephant who ran away from home to join the circus.

For a long time I shied away from the genre I was drawn to write, because that pull came from Chick Lit.

But those are the types of stories that run through my veins, and whisper to me in the middle of the night. I love the dynamic among females, and have always been fascinated by the interaction between men and women. I am a hopeless romantic, and have been in love with love since I first tumbled awkwardly into it.

For the past twenty-five years I’ve been writing what I know, and have been blessed enough to publish a few things along the way. For the past four months I have been writing from my soul, pouring out what – fingers crossed, knock on wood – will soon be my first full-length novel.

Yet even as my novel’s word count grows, there is another story that I yearn to tell.

It is my real life one, and it goes something like this:

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to find the man of my dreams. We met, fell in lust, annoyed the crap out of each other, broke up, got back together, fell in love, moved in together, annoyed the crap out of each other, found a rhythm, and finally got married. Now we spend every day living our own version of happily ever after.

All of this occurred just shy of my turning thirty, so it should go without saying that while my husband will be my last love, he certainly was not my first.

The illustrious position of first love goes to my junior high school sweetheart, who was incidentally also my high school sweetheart and my college sweetheart.

It recently occurred to me that I spent more years – seven of them to be exact – with my first love than I have so far with my last.

And even though my husband is my best friend, the answer to all my prayers, and the force that keeps me balanced, I still think of the first. I can still wake feeling off kilter, having just dreamed about him. I can smell him with the first rain of every season. I always think of him in any place that sells comic books.

I’d be willing to bet I’m not the only one who does this.

And yet no one talks about it.

If you’re lucky, you’ve experienced the magic that is a first love. And whether or not you have, we’ve all had a journey out of childhood, into adolescence, bound for the world populated by adults.

Everyone has a story to tell.

This is mine.