Super Newbie

Hello. I am Kathleen. I am brand new to this site. I've been writing since about age eight. I was in trouble a lot, and was sent to my room without television, telephone, or any contact with the world. So when I was banished for being bad, which was pretty often, I'd write.

My mother loved soap operas, so if I wanted to watch television during the day, that was what was on until four in the afternoon. I became deeply unsatisfied with the story lines in one of them, so I grabbed a notebook and started writing it myself. One notebook, a good thick one with six subjects and college rule, turned into about twelve within a year.

The thing I remember most about this was how visibly my writing style changed and how much I could see improvement when I thumbed through some of the early notebooks. I could literally see improvement from one notebook to the other. I remember being so excited about that. Then I stopped writing, thinking it was an unrealistic dream to be a writer.

I eventually needed a job that paid well, so I started being a Receptionist, and was promoted into Medical Billing in a Radiology company. I moved on to Orthopedics, then to Otolaryngology (technically should be Otorhinolaryngology but most ENT's leave out the "rhino" part because of the plastic surgery bit), then to Gastroenterology. I love the medical field, but writing has always been my passion.

I am now a stay-at-home mom of two (when told I would never be able to have any~ha!), and now the two of them are old enough to allow me time to write every now and then. I would love to hear from anybody who writes Romance & Women's Fiction. A friend of mine wants to get together and co-write a Romance Paranormal but that is way out of my comfort zone (which means I should probably do it). I feel paralyzed when we get together to write.

Astonishingly, I learned most of my spelling and grammar from typing classes! Now I go to a website (listed in bio). I am obsessed with editing and with grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. These things jump out at me when I am reading public works, brochures and other things. It's truly amazing to see how many errors are out there!

I have one Romance now complete, and have three others in the works. I have tried getting an agent but haven't been able to yet. A friend of mine says I should get a copyright before sending my work off to anybody else, but everything I've ever read about getting published had told me to let the agent/publisher take care of the copyrighting, so now I'm on the fence about it. Is it presumptuous to think someone could steal your work?

So, anyway, that's me! I'm glad to be here and have a lot of reading to do! I tend to be a bit wordy, so my apologies to you if I typed too much here!

Thanks everyone

<When you say co-writing a paranormal romance is out of your comfort zone, do you mean the paranormal part or the co-writing part?>

Actually, both. My good friend reads Paranormal Romance all the time, and she has a vast knowledge of it. I know absolutely nothing on the subject at all. She has great ideas but can't write them down, I have no ideas, but can write anything down that she says. It feels to her as if she is dictating, but I can articulate her spoken word and put it into the written word.

So it is a struggle. She is a close friend of mine, and we can basically say whatever to one another without offending in the process. I don't think the co-writing part would bother me much, but she wants me to come up with some ideas when I haven't any. So I am researching, and trying to get my hands wet with legends and witches and warlocks, demons and covens and whatever have you... I still feel paralyzed.

So, it's been almost six months, and we have only a page and a half written. She's starting to think it can't be done, but I'm not ready to throw in the towel quite yet.