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| Mary Davis |
Do you ever compare and doubt yourself because you’re not like the authors
you’ve met or read about? Mary Davis
shares personal experiences that remind us that God didn’t design people to be all
the same—and that includes writers. Enjoy! ~ Dawn
Portrait
of an Author
What is an author? When a lot of people think of an author
(me included), a stereotype jumps to mind.
~An author must have read veraciously when they were young.
~An author is a good reader.
~An author has always loved words.
~An author was good in English and always received “A’s”!
~An author is an excellent speller.
Looking at my own description, I should NOT be an author.
~ I was not a good reader as a child. I did not read much,
only what I had to for school. Reading was physically painful. My head would
start hurting, and my body tensed. Torture of the cruelest kind.
~I have always been a slow reader and still am.
~I didn’t care much for words and barely passed English with
“Cs”.
~Spelling? Well, let’s just say I couldn’t spell my way out
of a wet paper bag to save my life.
The reason for all these difficulties was because I was
blessed with dyslexia. I don’t see my dyslexia as a learning disability, all
though it was when I was a child, but an ability. Dyslexia helps me see things
in strange and offbeat ways sometimes.
I became a reader as an adult and love reading now. And I
love words. The right word can reveal so much about a character.
I have gotten better at English and might not have to
struggle so hard for a “C”.
I still can’t spell. I misspell the same words over and over
and over and over. Any day now, I expect my Spell Checker to give up on me. “If
you haven’t learned to spell that word by now, I’m not going to tell you
again.” There are some words I don’t even spell close enough, and Spell Checker
has no clue what I’m trying to spell. (I call that creative spelling.) When that happens, I have to look up a
synonym—that I can spell—in my thesaurus, and there’s the word I was
trying to spell. I wasn’t even close.
I believe an author should have a love of story. I always
loved story and loved creative writing, even if I couldn’t spell all the words
correctly and didn’t know grammar rules and punctuation. I’ve always had
characters roaming around in my head.
A nonfiction writer once told of her first experience at a
fiction writer’s conference. She had sat through two or three meals with these
fiction writers before she realized her eating companions weren’t talking about
real people but their characters. It had been strange to her to hear people
talk about the voices in their head. She said that they have medication for
that. :-)
Personally, I like the voices in my head. Sometimes they
have good ideas. I’m never alone, and I’m never, ever bored.
For
Charles Young, all’s fair in love and war. The British soldier scorns the
trappings of society life—including a society wife. So a posting in the remote
San Juan Islands is perfect for him. But when an American girl crosses enemy
lines, she turns his structured world upside down.
As
smart as she is fetching, Rachel Thompson’s only experience with romance is the
books she devours. But her father is determined that his spirited daughter make
a suitable match. And a British officer could never be suitable. Can this
real-life Romeo and Juliet triumph over the odds…
or will their romance trigger
the unthinkable—war?
Please visit her website at http://marydavisbooks.com Connect with her on FaceBook at https://www.facebook.com/mary.davis.73932 and on Pinterest at http://www.pinterest.com/marydavis73932/
