Me? A Writer?

First let me wish you a Happy Monday. Good morning everyone! I'm afraid this is going to be a long post so grab a cup of coffee and get comfortable. :-) I got up and found 99 new emails this morning.
I follow a lot of blogs. 99 isn't too bad though as long as I tackle them all today. Last week there were over 2000 unread emails and let's just say I was a little slow at checking my emails.
But...My post today is about me being a writer. I have been reading a lot of author interviews on blogs and usually the first question is;
"When did you know you wanted to be a writer?" And you will usually find answers like;
"When I was 9. I started writing short stories or describing my grandma's sugar cookies or, when I was 5, I wrote everything."

Personally, when I was 5, I was having imaginary tea with Elvis while sitting at my little table and chairs in my bedroom. I wasn't thinking of becoming a writer, but I had a great imagination! My "When I grow up, I want to be..." Was usually a teacher, or a secretary working in an office keeping everything organized for a business.

I, like all of you, have worn many different hats from wife, to mother, or father, to animal lover, and have had different jobs. Some interesting, fun, and exciting, others not so much so, but they all taught me valuable things. I was the cleaning lady for the YWCA, I worked in one of those little photo booths that they used to stick in parking lots where people would drive up and turn in their film and a couple of days later they'd drive back up and pick up their pictures. I even got robbed there during my first 3 weeks! Now that was scary, but I hung in there until the owner closed the place down about a year later.
 I worked for the school district off and on for 17 years. I was a noon aid, a food service worker, and even a reader for the blind in those 17 years. During my last year I decided to go to college.
Wow, me starting college at 40. I decided I wanted to change my age group and open a board and care for the elderly. I retired from the school district, rolled over my retirement to a traditional IRA and it was off to school. I lost my mom at the end of my first year to colon cancer and lost my brother at the beginning of my last semester a year and a half later to congestive heart failure, but I went on to graduate and got my A.A. degree. A few months after losing my brother I got a job working for a rental car company and my goal to open a board and care got pushed to the wayside.

 A few years later, while still working there, I decided I wanted to be a gift basket designer and was doing well enough at it that a few years later, I even opened a gift shop designing custom gift baskets and party sets. I decided to close my gift shop after 3 years due to the economy and a business partner who was going through a nasty divorce and failed to tell me he hadn't paid the rent in 7 months. My landlord was a great guy and I could have stayed open, but decided it was time to move on. And that was in February 2011. So here I sat wondering what to do. Throughout all these years I have had fantasies running through my head and the one at that time was so strong that in May I decided to sit down and write it out. In fact I was on the third chapter and decided I better google how to write a story. I didn't know what POV or HEA was. Heck I had to google how to write a sex scene! So here I am, not quite into a year and I'm a writer. Who would have thought that all those fantasies and my imagination would lead me to here.