Friday, December 5, 2014

Portrait of an Author by Mary Davis


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?




MARY DAVIS is an award-winning author of over a dozen novels in both historical and contemporary themes, four novellas, two compilations, and three short stories, as well as being included in various collections. She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers and is active in two critique groups. Mary lives in the Colorado Rocky Mountains with her husband of thirty years and two cats. She has three adult children and one grandchild. Her hobbies include quilting, porcelain doll making, sewing, crafts, crocheting, and knitting. 

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/