I have had one dream throughout my lifetime that I have held onto. No matter what life threw at me, no matter how tough things got, I held onto this dream.

I will be a writer some day. A writer of tales. A writer of words that people wanted to read and to which they enjoyed.

I held onto that dream and now, finally, I am starting to live it. I have a couple of short stories published at Etherbooks.com and have two novels and a memoir in the works. And you know what? It feels fabulous to live my dream!

Life has thrown me some awful stuff, but I’m stubborn and I’m a fighter. So no matter how down I got, no matter how hard things became, no matter how hopeless things looked, I fought back. At this stage of my life most women would be watching their kids become adults, they would be settled into a life and sitting back relaxing. Not me!

I don’t have kids and that’s ok. I am finding new adventures to get into, with my writing and with my life. Things are looking better than they have ever looked before. I’m ready! I’m ready to get things done, to do new things and to have new adventures! Let’s do this!! This is my new motto……. Let’s do this!!

I want to thank my good friend tiny over at tinylessonsblog.com for inviting me to #mywritingprocess blog tour. Tiny and I have been through NaMoWriMo together last year, her first year doing it and my second. We both managed to accomplish what we wanted to do with cheering each other on! Tiny even managed to publish a book that came out of NaMoWriMo.

“Confessions of a Rescue Dog” is tiny’s book. It’s a fantastic book full of stories of Bumbles adventures. Bumble is tiny’s pet poodle and he is just one cute, articulate dog! Go over to Tiny’s and say hi to her and Bumbles, you won’t regret it!

What am I working on right now?

I have several projects in the works. Including 2 novels and a memoir. Of course I haven’t finished any of them! I’ve also started a new project, a story in a film noir style of writing.
From as much as I’m writing, it looks like it will turn into a serial story. It’s called CC and the Fed and the first chapter is posted on my blog and can be read here.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’m not sure it does differ. It’s just ‘my voice’ instead of someone elses. My first novel, “The Key”, is an adventure novel, with a touch of fantasy in it. I’m 2/3 done with it. My second novel, “The Letter”, is a mixture of adventure, romance and revenge. My memoir is of course my story of my life. I have a lot more living to do, so who knows when that will get done.

Why do I write what I do?

Because it’s in me and I need to get it out. Really, it’s just that simple and that complicated. I get a story in my head and that just won’t let me be. It builds and builds till I need to write it down just so it will quiet down. This happens a lot, always has. Once I write it down, it grows, the characters grow and take over, I’m just the writing vessel.

How does my writing process work?

I’m not a disciplined writer. I don’t sit down every single day and write. I find that puts too much pressure on me and I just can’t write that way. I write when the feeling is too strong to ignore. Sometimes it only lasts for days, sometimes it can last for months. Then I need a rest. It’s kind of how I blog too. Some days I just have nothing inside to say. I’m a pantser, all the way. I never plan anything out, I just sit and write and am surprised at how often it’s actually something worth reading.

Now on to introducing two gentlemen who will carry the blog tour on next week. First up is Michael from Morpethroad. In his own words…….

I remember I was writing while in high school and then into College years I wrote and was published in a few different journals and anthologies.

I have to admit I have never written to be published, but rather for a specific audience I perceived at the time.

As a result a lot of my work I have written I have put aside once it had served its purpose and moved on to a new project.

I taught for 39 years in a variety of high schools and at each one I wrote for specific students and purposes. In some I wrote musicals, as there was a need for them in those environments. These I wrote in the late 1980’s at a school where the student population responded to my work and we had a production team that responded to my ideas.

When I moved to the last school I worked at there was a need for another type of writing.

As I taught drama in the senior school and as drama was a subject that was new in this school and as it is a practical subject students are required to perform some individual project, one option being performance.

To cater to this option I wrote a lot of performance pieces, some I have on my blog. Many were written for specific students in collaboration with them and that in itself was a great process to be part of.

At one point I did have a collection in book form, sold a few gave most away. I have been pleased over the years to go to a few schools and see my work performed and in ways I was pleased as the students took ownership of the script and adapted it to suit their needs and that was always the purpose of my writing to present a script they could edit for their own requirements.

In later years I re- wrote a play I had written in 1992 for a 2012 audience, a Theatre in Education piece about anorexia. Then in my final teaching year, I did a production on ‘Living with Lady Macbeth’ with a lot of me in it as I added a few characters and changed the script a little to suit the needs of my then students.

I write often in response to a need, in WP that tends to be the prompts that I attempt. Often I find the prompts challenging in themselves and I have learnt to be discriminating in what I do as I often think I am not being true to my own desire to write for me and that has to be balanced with my innate desire to write which I try to do most days.

I have written in collaboration with a few bloggers and that is always an experience one such collaboration is on my blog ‘The Cat People of Kagir.’
Writing for me is always an exploration of an idea, a challenge for me to try something new, often taking me out of my comfort zone and placing me in the world of people I see as far superior writers to me.

I have written a lot of poetry in recent times, I see poetry as a great challenge, how to write a lot in the least number of words possible.

Though I do see myself as more of a storyteller type of poet.

I enjoy the writing process and that includes the editing process. I think that is where my work gets honed down to the precise meaning I intended.

There is an inner excitement in the writing process, the chase to create and express in words an idea that germinates in my mind and is realised in some form on the page.

As my blog title suggests I do write ‘random meaningful words on a page’ which I shape into a meaning that I hope others  connect with too.
If I was to select three pieces that I am proud of it would be these three:
http://summerstommy.com/2014/01/24/dverse-meetingthebar-bedtime-stories-tall-tales-the-art-of-story-telling/ – this poem was written originally at the time of my father’s death, a few days before it happened and as I live alone and after spending all day with him watching his decline, I would come home and write about my day. This poem came from one of those nights where I was thinking that it was time for him to go and leave the pain and discomfort he was experiencing behind him. Two days later he died.
http://summerstommy.com/2013/07/04/marnie/

This is an example of a collaboration with a student to create a performance piece. We worked on this for a long time, it was constantly revised and reworked until we were both happy with the final product. It helped that the student I worked with was exceptionally talented.
http://summerstommy.com/2014/05/13/photo-challenge-8-war-paint-no-painted-maypole/

This is a recent piece and is also an example of how I am able to use my female muse as I have discovered I have both a male and female muse.. My female muse does afford me the opportunity to try to write from a feminine perspective and I like that I can.

And now Martin Conterez from Hungry Dog’s Lair;

As much as Martin loves to share his work, he hates coming up with a bio. He reads other bios and feels inadequate compared to the wittiness that others display with ease. Then there’s writing in the third person that makes him feel like he’s just gotten out of the psychiatric ward of a hospital and the only way he can cope with reality is by narrating his own life. Even worse is when he finally manages to cobble something together, he gets brutally honest with how he feels about his writing. He says things like this.

Martin is the vastly underwhelming author of Hungry Dog’s Lair which can be found at themathmaster.wordpress.com. He is currently writing a book titled The Other Side of Darkness, which he expects to be the worst selling book of all time, if he can ever get his butt in the chair often enough to actually complete said book. He never thought of himself as a writer until very recently. He wasted his youth in San Diego by getting a B.A. in Mathematics. He then wasted much of his adult life jumping from city to city and landing in the city that reflects failure the most, Washington D.C. It was there that he could be barely proud of the M.S. Management and MBA degrees, he later earned. He now posts unedited chapters of his book for free on his blog.

You can wish you read something else after you read the first several chapters here: http://themathmaster.wordpress.com/the-other-side-of-darkness/
If you think his writing is bad you should look at some of his drawings as he also does a web comic. Here is latest strip: http://themathmaster.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/raincloud-and-whirlwind-9/
If that’s not enough word and art vomit for you, this sniveling, whining, childish piece is probably the most difficult thing he’s ever written, and he’s disgustingly proud of it: http://themathmaster.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/one-hour/

If you still aren’t sure of his pretentiousness please visit him on social media so he may remove all doubt.
Google+: https://plus.google.com/+MartinConterez
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HungryDogsLair

Thank you gentlemen for helping me out on this blog tour! People go read these blog’s, you’ll like them, I promise!