My life is a fairytale....but not in that first mental image that pops up when you hear "fairytale." Not the shiny, sparkly, glitter floating through the air, glass shoes and rainbows image. Because when you think about it, fairytales usually start off with things being ho-hum and then suddenly there is this promise of something great about to happen..and then that something falls apart and then terror and loneliness ensue...and only after all of that does Prince Charming come in and they live happily ever after. That's my life. Except my life doesn't involve crowns or castles and we don't own a single horse. My prince charming came back to my life in a big, noisy truck after we hadn't seen each other for eleven years. We'd been engaged while I was in high school and he was in the Army (he was a senior when I was a freshman) but I got cold feet and didn't figure in his male pride...so we spent eleven years being stupid and getting terribly hurt. The man I married ran off while I was pregnant with our third son. My parents moved the boys and I back into their home, I started a cleaning business and, once #3 was born, I went back to school. Three years after their dad left I just happened across my high school sweetheart. We got married six months later. We may be poor. Our lives aren't what we thought they would be but dang it! We are blissfully happy. I started writing again in the midst of the vampire/paranormal craze, determined to write something with an original plot line for the poor teenagers around me (I've got at least a decade on my fellow students). Presently, I am working on book 2. It's slow-going. Very slow, as I am also interning at a newspaper and still in an Applied Journalism class. People ask what I want to do when I graduate in May. The answer is simple and impractical, "I want to finish writing Book 2."Writing has always been what I do. From the time I wrote my first poem in kindergarten I was hooked. There are numerous 3-inch binders in my basement to testify to the fact that I spent way too much time by myself as a child and as a teenager...Whenever I actually bothered to get in trouble my mother would ask my father, "What're we going to do? What're we going to ground her from?"My father's answer? "Take away her pens and paper."