Savannah's Blog

So, when people ask me “what’s your thing” or “what are you into” my answer is boring. Incredibly so. I say “I write. I’m a writer.” Only, it usually comes out “I like werdz” with me smiling way too broadly. After the awkward encounter I feel like an excited preschooler gushing about eating paste or something. I know people who have countless amazing talents. I am not one of those people. I trip over my own feet when I walk. I’ve been known to slap myself silly when trying to get rid of a bug or a spider in my hair. I just put words down and sometimes they come out as a story. That’s it. I’m a one-trick pony. Once when I was much younger I tried to learn how to crochet. That resulted in several thirty-foot long braided strings scattered around my house. I owned a sewing machine for a short time. It ended up stored in a closet for about five years. I managed to sew one or two things, which is a generous way to describe the swatches of material that I managed to stick...

Each morning when I wake up and the weather outside permits I take my first cup of coffee for the morning right to the front porch, take a seat, and watch the sunrise in the eastern sky. Sounds idyllic. I live in rural central Missouri so that is a fairly accurate description. But idyllic isn't the only reason I choose to begin each day like this. For a long time I started each day planted in front of the morning news. Headlines. Politics. Commentary. Gossip. A little bit of weather. I was a consumer of all things breaking and exclusive. And I have been this way for a really long time. I recall following presidential elections in the 1980s when I was in elementary school. I knew the name of the man in the White House when I was in first grade. At 14, I walked into the local newspaper office and volunteered as an intern. Later, when my kids were old enough, I freelanced at my hometown newspaper, then moved on to a larger city paper. I knew issues, interviewed city and coun...

Why do you write?  Where do your ideas come from? How do you have the time? Those are the words people like to speak at writers. I have come to realize that many times the askers of these questions are writers who do not write, or people who really want to be writers, they just never quite find themselves doing the work for it. That’s not always the case, but I have learned to recognize the question for what it is. In fact, I use it to bring myself back to reality on those awful days when writer’s block is a real thing. Don’t worry. This isn’t some kind of “inside baseball” writer post for other authors. Actually it is a hat tip toward you, the reader. I used to think the answer to “why do I write” had a lot to do with me, with my needs. It does; there is convincing evidence that I would be nonfunctional if I wasn’t writing. The more I write, though, the more I realize the answer to this question has to do with the people for whom I write. I don’t write to live in...