Meet Lisa

Hiya!

I wrote Inheritance many years ago out of an obsession with characters that really wanted me to tell their story - well, one in particular did, and that was the main character, Joe.  Wendy was a great supporting character and she had things to say, but Inheritance is by and large Joe's story.  

The thing is, I didn't know just what I had written until it was refined through an editing process that took 14 years and a decade of deeply personal healing and growth for me.  During those years, I divorced, remarried, added two more kiddos to the three I came into the new marriage with, my oldest son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (explains my obsessive writing), and I witnessed my youngest daughter's life slip away from a fatal genetic disorder - which was just after I published the book.

I fell into a clinical depression, separated from my husband for a few months, took a decade to heal our marriage, and finally come to a place of peace.

In all that time since publication (another 14 years) I haven't been able to write, and that's no surprise with life's ups and downs.  I lost my sister to ALS, which ravaged her before our eyes and took her from this world within a year of being diagnosed, lost my mother to leukemia (it was a late diagnosis that took her in less than a year), challenged myself with going back to work after two decades at home with children, further challenged myself with more education and almost have my preliminary early childhood teaching credentials (I'm a preschool teacher), and continue to work with my husband to heal our marriage - it will be our 25th wedding anniversary this year!  Now that the kids are grown and almost all have flown the nest, my husband and I are finding the time to date, travel, and just spend time together - some things that we'd never been able to do when in the thick of the challenges we faced.

In all, I think I've had some experiences that will come out in my writing, but I had been too close to ground zero to write.  They say, "write through your pain," which can help you process it, but the effect it has on me is to cement me in that pain.  I need to go through the process of time in order to emerge renewed.  And that is what is interesting about those three months it took me to write Inheritance.  I was disconnected from my feelings, I didn't recognize them as my own, until the day I was researching things about Joe and came across a book for Adult Children of Alcoholics.  Boom!  It could have been written by me.  And that's why it took me 14 years to edit Inheritance in short little bursts every so often; I had to grow as an adult child of alcoholics.

Now, I don't drink alcohol and I was never promiscuous, but I understood addiction as it pertained to me, from within, struggling with my own addictions (the all or nothing mindset that bipolar people can have, the hyper-focus, the quest for a dopamine fix, the endless struggle with depression).  Yet, the story is not my own, it really is fiction; I just think I understood the characters, first on a blind level, then with introspection, and, finally, retrospection.

I hope you enjoy Inheritance.  I hope you enjoy the writing I will post on this site.  I have some "100 Word Snapshots" to post and some poetry.  The snapshots are just that - a little glimpse into a character's life.  Many are seeds for stories.  The poetry is what I am given to write sometimes simply because I see what I feel compelled to say in the form of a poem.  And I will keep you updated about a new story I want to write which still involves finding the music that gives a soul to the story.  I may have long-term stability with bipolar disorder, but I am still a "mood writer."  I have to write from somewhere within that compels me and I seek out music that does this.  Meanwhile I have been keeping a journal as I do a life inventory and blow the dust off some little gems that I might be able to do something with as a writer.

My very best,

Lisa