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Such wonderful moments those were. The beginning of a satisfying journey as well.

Being published began for me when Mother discovered my first poem in the elementary school newspaper. I was too young to even know we had a paper or that my teacher had given them my poem. My next publications came when I enrolled in journalism in junior high school and became the newspaper’s girls sports reporter.

In the tenth grade, I decided to earn a bachelor of science in nursing. For reasons that escape me, because I recall zilch about his classes, I went back to my junior high school English teacher to share the exciting news. He was a tall, soft spoken man with pale skin and black, black hair. He looked at me through thick-lensed glasses with black rims and astonished me by saying, “You should be a writer.”

Even today I remember how those words crushed.

That BSN degree was mine, I’d married and had a child when I wrote an opinion piece one day and mailed it cold to a magazine. They not only printed it, they PAID me for it. I had no idea people were paid for what they wrote.

With that nice taste of success, I sold freelance articles, features and stories and won contests off and on. However, writing took a back seat to me as a wife and mother with a career in nursing.

For a time, I belonged to a critique group of published writers, and I wrote the first three chapters of a novel. I don’t know why I started a book any more than I knew why I’d written that first opinion piece. I just did. Since I had no clue what I was doing, those chapters went into a drawer even though the group was excited about them.

It’s one thing to have the beginnings of a novel in your drawer and quite another to have finished it. I knew I’d have to complete that book and sell it some day because that’s what real writers did. And, thanks to that English teacher years ago, I'd finally figured out I could add that to my resume - Wife, mother, grandmother, public health nurse, writer.

More on the story Thursday. . .

Have a great day!

Carolina Valdez - Where passion unlocks the sweet ecstasies of love