I Want To Talk About Me! That Is the Name of A Song.

The question from the Ultimate Blog Challenge was how did you get started in your niche.

I don't think writers can actually pin point a place where they get started. They can pin point their first published piece, or the first paid published piece, or their first completed novel, or the time that they wrote a book at five years old and it became an international best seller, but it's hard to say where writing starts.

I grew up writing. I wrote stories in the seventh grade that my teacher loved and would read to the other students raving about how brilliant I am. Fortunately they were entertaining enough that everyone didn't hate me. I wrote songs while I was a teenager (actually I wrote lyrics, the music part was just in my head since I didn't have that skill to actually write music). But then every teenage girl writes poetry. I don't know if it's possible to be a teeange girl without writing bad poetry. I wrote stories for my children. They liked them. I made my children put on Christmas Eve performances for their father where I would write a play for them, or I wrote songs for them to sing (yes, I wrote the music for that but never wrote it down or played it. I sang it to them and they learned it and it was all acapella.) And that went on every year until they rebelled as teenagers and refused to do it anymore and I was no longer allowed to be a stage mother. I wrote performance pieces for church because they could get me for free. I was even sort of plagerized once when one of my poems went to a church across the country without my name on it.

I wrote short musicals where I changed the lyrics to well known songs and teenagers actually performed this in front of people. They were forced to by the adults.

I wrote talks to give in church. In my church at the time, lay people gave the sermons. So I got to sermonize. Only I couldn't get all fiery and have a gospel choir behind me. That would have been cool.

I always wrote. And every now and then I would send something out and it was always rejected. Except for the time that the Edmonton Journal was asking for bedtime stories. So I sent them a bedtime story that I wrote starring my two little girls as princesses who make friends with a dragon. That was published. Payment was a t-shirt with the bedtime stories logo (I still have the shirt - never worn) and I believe there was a gift certificate to a book store.

The first actual paid writing piece came about one day when I was angry. I was pregnant with my seventh and last child. And I had gone to church where again, the only thing people would ask me was when I was due. And I was tired of being just the pregnant woman who wasn't a person. So I went home and I wrote a scathing piece about being pregnant and the things people say to you and I sent it off to Chicken Soup. Yes, that Chicken Soup. And they liked it. They published it in "Chicken Soup for the Expectant Mother's Soul". I was so happy to get the check and when I got the one copy of the book they sent me I eagerly looked for my story, "Did

You Just Eat a Watermelon" which I found on page 39, the first one of a new chapter and opposite a cartoon. Bingo! What a great place to be. Everyone flips through to look at the cartoons! And there was my story and I turned the page and there was - the wrong name. Yes, the wrong name. You see when I signed my contract it was clear that I was writing under my maiden name "Anna Maria Junus", however because I was married and taken my husband's name the check was to go to Anna Wight. And there was my story under the name Anna Wight. So I looked in the back where the list of contributors is. And there was my name - Anna Maria Junus. No one would know that Anna Wight and Anna Maria Junus is the same person. I have since ditched the husband and the married name. No confusion anymore.

So the next step was contacting the local paper about writing a weekly humor column.

And they agreed.

If I had known how impossible that was I never would have tried it. I approached many newspapers during the time I wrote a column and maybe got a total of four.

While I was writing the column I also got accepted by a traditional publisher for my first book "Roses

and Daisies." The editor who accepted my work and did a fabulous job promoting a previously unknown author so that he made the New York Times best seller list, left the company and with it went her knowledge of how to promote. At a magazine that had published one of my stories (actually made more with that short story than I did with my book), the editor that liked my work, died. I enjoyed a little fame for a while. Very little. Strangers would come up to me and know who I was. Usually when I was wearing grubby clothes and no make up. They would want to talk about becoming writers and how to do it while I was still figuring it out. One time I called a local radio station to talk about parenting and when I told them my name - they knew who I was! That one floored me. And because my main writing subjects were my children, they figured I might have something to say about parenting.

The column lasted five years and I went through a lot of editors and then I got an editor that didn't like my work and didn't understand how humor writing works and got rid of me. The same week that I lost my column, I also lost my book contract.

It's tough when everything falls apart on you at once.

Since that time I've been self-publishing where I put my books on Amazon and no one buys them and no one knows who I am anymore. Fame is fleeting.

I'm thinking of trying traditional again so I can gather a collection of rejection letters.

And there are days when it occurs to me to just give it up already.

But for some reason, I just can't.

I must have some kind of masochism in me. But I do have books!