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Lydia Joyce
When I was very young, I didn't want to be a writer. I
wanted to be a grandma. After all, grandmas don't have to
work, they enjoy the company of children whenever they
desire, and whenever they don't, they send them home to
their parents. I would wear a large-old fashioned hat, have
salt-and-pepper Gibson girl hair, and grow roses.
When I discovered that grandma-ing was not a career, I
settled on writing as second best.
I began dictating my first stories to my mother before I
could write. I filled notebooks in elementary school, and in
middle school and high school, I wrote over 800 manuscript
pages in my spare time as well as four plays that saw
production.
Yet I never seriously considered writing as a career after
elementary school. Writers starve, I was always told; a
writer makes a decent wage about as often as pigs fly. And I
wanted to make money, so I moved from Texas to Indiana to
enroll in Purdue's engineering program.
I hated it.
Finally, I decided there was a good deal of difference
between being good at a thing and liking it and that liking
it was more important, so I left engineering. After changing
my major a second time, I still managed to graduate in four
years with majors in English and Spanish and a minor in
religious studiesand almost another major in creative
writing if illness hadn't prevented me from completing it.
Meanwhile, I wrote three manuscripts and began submitting
them and collecting rejection letters.
After graduation, I married a wonderful computer
scientist I met my sophomore year, and so far we have
one son, "the Bear." I got published a year and a
half after graduation, with my first book releasing in
2005. Since then, I have completed six books and aim
to have finished at least 12 before I turn thirty!
We started out in New Mexico, where I renovated a house amid
other insanities. We're now living in the Washington,
D.C. area, where I write full time and homeschool the Bear.
Visit her website at www.lydiajoyce.com.
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