My Writing Journey, so far.

May 13, 2024

My writing journey is only beginning. It all started in 2018, eight years after Cheryl, my wife of 28 years, was taken from me by a massive stroke. The years that followed her death were like hiking across a desert in the heat of summer with only a canteen of water. I spent much of the first year in the solitude of the Sonoran Desert, where the silence was both a comfort and a stark reminder of the void her death left behind.

We had moved from the misty grey skies of Seattle to the sunbaked sands of Tucson in 2006, seeking warmth and new beginnings. Yet, in those quiet, sun-soaked moments in the desert through 2010 and 2011, I realized how deeply I still suffered from her loss. I realized I needed a change-something drastic, something that would take me far from the life I knew, the life I was treading through.

In 2013, I left Tucson behind, not to return to the familiarity of Seattle, but to start from scratch in Colombia. It was a bold move-one son encouraged me, the other wasn't so sure. My new life would be teaching English in Barranquilla, a gritty industrial city on the Caribbean coast. It was no tropical paradise, but its lack of native English-speaking teachers made getting a new start a bit easier, gave me a purpose, and something to focus on beyond my grief.

In 2018, I began to write, pouring my emotions onto the page. Writing about Cheryl, about those tumultuous years after her death, was like pulling back a veil. I found myself confronting her death in ways I hadn't before, and slowly, the weight of my grief began to lift. It didn't vanish-nor do I want it to-but it shifted, allowing me to move forward, to see the world beyond the pain.

The pandemic in 2020 brought my teaching career to an abrupt end. My students preferred in-person lessons but the quarantine brought those to an end. As the quarantine stretched on, the opportunity to retire early presented itself so I took it. As I made peace with Cheryl's loss, my writing transformed. The story I had been writing and rewriting expanded, eventually took a new turn, a new life of its own, as I started to weave in my experiences in Colombia. What began as a personal reflection, a way of getting my pent-up feelings out, evolved into a novel-one that's about 25-30% rooted in reality, the rest imagined but grounded in truth. Eight drafts and three professional edits later, it is available on Amazon.com.

In between drafts, I honed my craft with short stories and writing exercises, devouring blogs and websites about writing. I started submitting my work to anthologies and online magazines, and to my surprise, sixteen of my stories found homes with fifteen different publishers.

In November 2022, I embarked on a backpacking journey through South America, from Colombia to Uruguay and back, ten months and eight countries visited. I took a break from writing during this time, though I continued submitting short stories when I could. By April 2024, I settled in Arequipa, Perú, ready to dive back into my work. With two novels in progress, I'm eager to see where these stories take me.

This is my writing journey so far-unconventional, perhaps, but unfolding, one story at a time, one book after another.