SPT [self-promotion time]

have you every googled 'pictures of shhhh'?  Try it sometime.  It's bizarre

My mother just finished reading BEING.  She loved it, of course.  She's my mother.  After gushing a bit, she asked where my ideas come from.  I had to laugh.  My stories, every single one of them, grow out of my childhood experiences.  My stories begin in all those little secrets I kept from my parents but figured they knew anyway.  So I was surprised she didn't recognize those bits and pieces of me in my words. 

As a kid I was, shall we say, rebellious.  I snuck out of the house at night to roam around with my friends.  I had endless, crazy nightmares about dinosaurs.  (I still have those, sometimes).  I ran away from church almost every Sunday.  I was the oldest of six kids, and had the classic pancake-child upbringing--meaning my parents had stricter rules for me than they did for my siblings--and I noticed.

I saw a documentary on writing a few months ago where an author suggested that all the life experience you really need to write, you gain by the time you're 21.  Thinking on the experiences my stories grow from, I have to say this is so very true!  Though I twist the experiences of my childhood--exaggerate them, sometimes make them other-worldly or incredibly impossible--I can always follow the ideas back to where they came from: little old me, growing up in the outskirts of the west, all those years ago.