Hello everyone. I figured that I would start off with a bit of history on myself and how I got into writing. I know there is a bit of a bio on the back of my book but that just doesn’t cover everything. I know I said I was born in the City of Chicago, but I wanted to elaborate on that since my childhood is where my love of books and writing started.
My family is my life and in some cases some of the inspirations for some characters that I create. My mother’s parents immigrated from Poland with one of my two uncles when he was just a child, soon after that my second uncle and my mother were born. My parents met and got married however it wasn’t a love affair to last and they did get divorced. I was raised from the age of 3 by my mother on her own with the help of my grandmother whom would watch me on the weekends and nights my mother had to work as my mother worked as a waitress for most of my childhood, a job I praise her for having for as long as she did and being able to keep a roof over our heads and the bills paid as it isn’t a well-paying job as she worked for family restaurants, not chain restaurants who are required to pay regular minimum wage.
Due to this, I lived in two different neighborhoods in the city of Chicago the Brighton Park neighborhood is where my mother and I lived in an apartment above an elderly woman and her son who treated us like family. While I spent the time that my mother was working, unless I was in school, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Which over time grew to be a bad neighborhood and became the inspiration for the alleyway in my book Deadly Conflicts. At a young age, I was introduced to reading books about strong female characters by my mother allowing me to read the Baby Sitter’s Club Books, books by V.C. Andrews (after she had read them first of course until I was old enough to pick out my own books) and various other authors. I also enjoyed reading action books, sci fi books at the time as well as a pre-teen. I will talk more about what books I like to read in a separate blog post.
In my bio, I also talked about how I entered a writing contest when I was just 11 but there is a story about how I ended up in that contest. When I first started writing stories I started by making other stories in my own way. Such as Little Red Riding Hood defeating the big bad wolf herself and saving her grandmother and other such stories.
My teacher at the time read these and thought they were creative and suggested that I join the Chicago Young Authors contest. So, I did with a story about a car that just wanted a family called ‘Freddy the Ford’s Families’ before I knew about trademark laws. But it was just for a contest and created for fun. I wrote and illustrated the book myself. I made it all the way to the state level but due to having had my cover changed by others without my consent I lost there. But during my time I got to meet a lot of great authors whom read my story and told me that they thought it was a great storyline created by someone so young and that they thought I had a great gift for storytelling.
The teachers in the school were so proud, as I was the only one from our school to make it as far as I did. So I was asked by the kindergarten, first and second-grade teachers to come down and read my story to their classes, my first book reads in essance.
– Note this is only part of my story, please watch out for Part 2 of this post coming soon till then Keep Reading.
Amy N Showers 