How I Started Writing

 
For Nancy...

	My writing career started in part because of my cousin Nancy.
She was always a sickly child, every spring and fall having to endure
weeks in the hospital because of acute breathing difficulties for
which doctors could find no cure.  Her respiration was always labored.
She only made it through half of grade school with all her internal
parts intact. Mom told me one pewter-colored fall morning that Nancy
was in the hospital again, facing serious surgery.  Most of her right
lung had to be removed.

	I was a year and a half older than she, and I knew I had to do
something.  Since Nancy was the cousin I was closest to, I wanted it
to be something special.  She was never one to read. like I did:  she
watched television.  But even she admitted that television got old.
So one day I sat down and wrote out a story:  one page, in pencil, on
typing paper.  I went to visit her on Saturday in the hospital with
the page in hand.  Nancy didn't turn off the television while I read
it to her.  She did say she enjoyed my story.

	That was enough encouragement for me.  I wrote another one
about a dog.  This time when I read it, Nancy turned off the
television to listen.

	I don't know how many stories I wrote, but they piled up in a
file in my desk.  I wrote about horses, about cats, and about people
doing strange things.  I performed the stories in the hospital, with
Nancy and her nurses an attentive audience.  Those tales planted a
notion in my mind that wouldn't go away.  

	I finally realized the culmination of that notion when my
first short story "The Scourge of the Wicked Kendragon" was published
in a TSR anthology edited by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.  When
"And With Finesse" came out in Fantastic Alice, I knew I'd figured out
how to tell stories.  It was years before I remembered writing those
little bits for Nancy, and made the connection with my writing career.

	Nancy passed away in December of 2004, on the morning of the
winter solstice.  Her normally merry heart was too tired to continue
waiting for a heart-lung transplant even though she was near the top
of the national list for organ donations.

	So I continue performing stories for her because I know she's
still listening from somewhere.  That's half of the reason I read my
works aloud before I finish them.

	I wonder what she thought of my first book.
 
In Memoriam...
  Nancy Sue Benedict Phoebus