by Kimberly Due-Vacco

Created on: September 04, 2009   Last Updated: September 05, 2009

I have a deep and abiding love for the written word. I enjoy writing and hardly a day has gone by in the past 40 years since I learned to write, that I don't write something. Some days it will only be a quick note dashed off to a child's teacher; time constraints and life often gets in the way of any real writing that I may have on my mind. That doesn't usually stop my mind from writing, though. My mind is almost constantly in a state of thought, as I compose little snippets of this and that inside my head. It really wasn't until adulthood that I realized that not everyone had these compositions swirling around in their heads all the time. I had no idea.

I certainly never thought of it as a gift. I thought of them as daydreaming; nothing more. Other people in my family were the gifted ones. My artist sister, my brother the musician, my father who builds beautiful furniture and my creative mother; those were the talented people within my family. Everyone could actually see and hear their offerings - their art. I was just the kid who made up stories, read and lived inside her own head; nothing special there. Or so I was led to believe. I guess if we have no tangible product to offer at the end of the day our talent is not really worth much by the world's standards. Certainly, no one ever encouraged me to pursue my writing.

Funny thing happened a few years ago. I discovered the internet. I admit that I was forced, kicking and resisting into the World Wide Web. I had to learn how to send and receive e-mails or I was going to be left out of the loop in some of my circles. Anyone who knows me knows that being left out of the loop is a fate worse than death in my book, so I reluctantly learned how to use the internet. Once I opened the Pandora's Box that is the internet, I discovered a whole new world. A world where I could write down those bits of composition from my head and with the touch of a button other people could read it. At last a tangible result of my ponderous, daydreaming mind. It was a beautiful thing. I began, slowly, to put myself (my work) out there and I was encouraged by the positive feedback I began to encounter. Bolstered by that positivism I began to venture out a little more. It is one thing for nameless, faceless people on the internet to read my work, but it is another thing all together for those who are close to me to read and analyze the things I write. Scarier still is writing something in hopes that someone will pay money for it. I was

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