We all are products of our pasts.

I’m a writer because I love reading and I love telling stories, but I’m also a writer because my Grandma Joyce was one. She wrote them in short form and in plays for the kids she worked with at church, and expressed her creativity in a variety of ways, though pastels and painted art that still fills my Aunt Lerri’s back porch.

I’m a writer because my mom had a love of sci fi and fantasy that she passed on to me, starting with her amazing shelf of other worlds – Pern, Trantor, Rama, and many more.

I’m a writer because my father has the gift of storytelling in his own way, through his almost supernatural ability to connect and entertain friends, family, and business contacts.

I’m a writer because my Grandma Hazel loved to cook. She could make almost anything, and her culinary creativity pulses even today in my veins, half a decade after she passed on.

I am the sum of all of these people, and many more before them. Relatives and ancestors who pulsed with creativity of all kinds.

Now it’s my turn to put it out into the world.

Who knows what else it will inspire?