How I Got Started Writing for AC

It's not a glamorous story. It will be one with more detail than you care to know. But that's just me and that's how it goes.

E-mail opened a new era for me. Okay, okay, e-mail is an old technology, but it allows one to write in communicative, informative messages. One liners suffice for many folks, even phrases or cryptic acronyms and abbreviations. Not me. I clack away at the keyboard with full sentences in English and all the details my e-mail recipients don't need to know.

Traveling from place to place, from the East Coast to the West Coast and high places in between (e.g., the Colorado Rockies at 13,000 feet) is what I found myself doing a lot of after retiring from my day job. Communicating with friends in high places, and even the lowlands, occurred by e-mail. At the end of the day, instead of a phone call, an e-mail went out. There was a freedom in expressing all the gory details of my day vividly and at length.

Those e-mail messages took the form of agonizing details about disasters discovered in houses left alone for too long. The pipes froze, a flood was found in the bathroom, a mule deer died on the doorstep, or some other catastrophe earned status in the reporting to friends afar. They took on importance as a basis for communication and provided material to write about without end.

'You should write a book. Get yourself published. Write an article online. Really, you should publish your stories, Lorraine,' was the advice everybody said. No one dared say 'how about you quit sending me these four-page e-mails in 6-point type because we don't read them anyway.' Not one of my friends would ever say that to me. Although some suggested shortening.

Writing those e-mails was cathartic for me. They gave exit to expressions held within. They yielded analytical thinking and creative descriptions about what annoying things were happening and why they were happening to me. Besides, nobody wants to hear you ranting and raving and cussing out loud about all the nonsensical things going on in your life. Writing about them in e-mails addressed to friends targeted a captive audience. You can't not open an e-mail from a friend. If that happened, I didn't know it. There must have been a lot of silent PF4s (the delete button on old computers).

So, one day during a cross-country trip going from east to west across Kansas, we encountered horrendous weather. A tornado was brewing in our path across the state. Long story short: we skirted the tornado that formed and flew with great fury only a few miles from where we were. We were northwest of Dodge City. The tornado hit Dodge City. We only got flooding downpours, heavy hail, frightening lightning, and black thunderous skies. We emerged from the maelstrom in Garden City to blue skies, sunshine, and a Best Western motel with free Internet, where I wrote the e-mail story of skirting a tornado in south central Kansas.

'Here's an online article about the tornado we were in,' my husband said at his laptop, stretching the truth only a little about the 'in' versus 'near' the violent tornadic activity. The article was a first-hand report on Associated Content about the tornado. That AC contributor writing that piece must have been used to such weather because the article didn't reflect the terror I felt while being in the same storm. Let me see that, I said. I'm going to check out this site and see if I can have the text of my e-mail published. My account recounts the storm as well, if not better, I thought. No humility here. I did. It was published. The rest is history. And I'm still writing for AC.

So, I tell my old friends on the old late-night e-mail distribution, see, I took your advice. I'm writing a book. You're reading it in 2-page installments on Associated Content.