Banging Out A Story

This article first appeared in Poetic Monthly Magazine,
www.poeticmonthly.com
in the January 2009 issue. I wrote for the magazine for about a year, and
since the cost of the magazine is $7 per issue or $77 per year, I wanted to
share a few of the articles I wrote, here on my blog. Best part is, you can
read them for free. :) But, another reason why I am posting them here, is
because I want to keep this blog going but can't think of anything
interesting enough to write about. Besides, the sequel to "Wild Heart" which
is titled, "To Tame A Heart" will be available soon, and I want to do all
that I can to promote it. I don't know when the book will be published, but
I do promise to keep you updated. Until then, here's something to read while
you wait.

Banging Out A Story

There are many different ways to write. Some draw up an outline and stick
to it, strictly. Others, like me, write straight from the hip, jotting down
ideas randomly until.voila, you have a story. Some folks carry around a
pencil and notebook, writing down thoughts at any time during the day or
night. Some, like me, sit down at a computer and type it up. I heard once
of a woman who, due to a loss in vision, spoke her ideas in to a recording
device. But, when I was a child, just learning that I could write a story,
I did none of these things.
"At all hours of the night," my mom has said, "I would hear bang bang
bang, coming from Shannon's room, and I knew she was up, writing a story."
So, what type of writing device would make a "bang bang bang" sound? Why,
a Braille writer, of course. What? You don't know what a Braille writer
is? Well, it's a machine that writes Braille, a system of dots that the
blind can feel with their fingers and read.
Braille was created by Louis Braille (1809-1852), and it is simply a code.
There are six dots in one cell. Different combinations of those six dots,
make up a letter or a number. It also creates symbols of punctuation, like
commas, periods and quotation marks.
I began learning Braille at the tender age of three, learned to type on a
typewriter when I was eight, and began learning the computer my junior year
of high school, 1995. At present, thanks to the wonderful advances in
technology, I am now sitting in my living room, a laptop on my lap, typing
this article.
Ok, so if I'm blind, how do I use a computer? It's simple, really, yet
brilliant, too. I use a program called a screen reader. It uses text to
speech, reading the text and even graphics to me. It reads as I type, and I
wouldn't trade it for anything.
During the summer of 1994, when I was fifteen-years-old, I sat down one
evening at my desk, put a sheet of Braille paper in to my Braille writer and
began writing a story. I'll never forget how proud of myself I was for
writing such a good first page. Now, nearly fifteen years later that story
is a published work and now available for purchase. It's called, "WILD
HEART" and it's published by Publish America.
During my teen years, I wrote quite a lot of poems and even won second
place in a writing contest my senior year of high school. My poems are
serious, silly, funny, and everywhere else in between. The one thing they
do have in common is rhyming. I absolutely cannot write a poem that does
not rhyme. Not only do they rhyme, but they have a certain rhythm to them,
meaning, you can tap your foot to the beat of any one of them. I guess this
comes from learning nursery rhymes.
When I was very small, my mom used to recite Mother Goose nursery rhymes
over and over to me until, today, I don't think there is more than one that
I do not know.
Without argument, I love to write.want to write.need to write. I want so
much to make people smile and to make them think. However, the most
important thing I want to accomplish in writing is to witness for Jesus
Christ. I am a Christian and have been since I was thirteen-years-old. My
prayer is that you, the reader will know this just by reading something that
I have written.