Holding on to Childhood Writings---Angela Scott

Today I'm delighted to have Angela Scott as a guest blogger at All Things Writing. She is currently touring with her book, Desert Rice, and we are lucky to be one of her stops. Please check out her book info!--- Mary Ann

The first novel I ever wrote was actually a soap opera. No joke.

 

I've always loved to write. From the time I was a little kid I was constantly making up stories, and whenever we were given an assignment to write a story in class, while the other kids groaned about it, I was already yanking out my pencil and paper and jotting down ideas.

 

But I remember being in 5^th or 6^th grade and one summer I was discussing with good friend of mine, Brandy, about how bad one of the soap operas on TV was. We lived through the era in which our mothers watched a lot of soap operas and so we'd catch an episode or two. One of the plot lines was SO over the top that we giggled about it and thought it seemed so dumb. Yet our mothers loved it! They couldn't get enough.

 

That got us thinking: why not create our own soap opera. Yeah! We could totally write one ourselves and submit it to networks. That was our plan.

 

So, we grabbed lined paper, came up with a bunch of characters—a doctor, a single father, a cheating husband, a sexy lady, a female lawyer, etc…—and started writing. She picked her characters and I picked mine. Whenever one of my characters had something to say to one of hers, I would write it down and hand over the notebook to her and she'd respond.

 

It was SO cool. We spent the summer, lying in our backyards, sun tanning (yeah, back before we knew a lot about sun damage and skin cancer) and would pass the notebook back and forth. We even had stage direction and everything.

 

We did this for the entire summer (I know, for some of you you're thinking, boy that's a sucky summer, but I loved it). We had twists and turns and MURDER!!! Lots of murder. We also had romance too. Lots of romance—elementary school type romance. The kind of romance in which French kissing was about as far as things went, because eewww gross J

 

By the end of summer, we had well over 400 pages of soap opera script, but school started and we never did submit that pencil and pen written script to anyone. I held onto it for years, not wanting to part with it, until I became a teenager and thought the whole thing was stupid and threw it away.

 

I could smack myself now.

 

I so wish I would have held onto it. Not because it was masterful or good in anyway, but because it was such an awesome memory to have. It would have been fun to read back through it some twenty plus years later.

 

That's why now, I hold onto everything. Every poem, every short story, every rough draft. It's a reminder of how far I've come, and I never want to forget that.

 

Author BIO:

Angela Scott hears voices. Tiny fictional people sit on her shoulders and whisper their stories in her ear. Instead of medicating herself, she decided to pick up a pen, write down everything those voices tell me, and turn it into a book. She's not crazy. She's an author. For the most part, she writes contemporary Young Adult novels. However, through a writing exercise that spiraled out of control, she found herself writing about zombies terrorizing the Wild Wild West--and loving it. Her zombies don't sparkle, and they definitely don't cuddle. At least, she wouldn't suggest it. She lives on the benches of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains with two lovely children, one teenager, and a very patient husband. She graduated from Utah State University with a B.A. degree in English, not because of her love for the written word, but because it was the only major that didn't require math. She can't spell, and grammar is her arch nemesis. But they gave her the degree, and there are no take backs. 

 

Blog - www.angelascottauthor.com
Twitter - @whimsywriting
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/AngelaScottWriter
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13636317-desert-rice

 

 

Samantha Jean Haggert is a beautiful twelve-year-old girl—but no one knows it. All they see is an awkward boy in a baseball cap and baggy pants. Sam’s not thrilled with the idea of hiding her identity, but it’s all part of her older brother’s plan to keep Sam safe from male attention and hidden from the law. Fifteen-year-old Jacob will stop at nothing to protect his sister, including concealing the death of the one person who should have protected them in the first place—their mother.

Sam and Jacob try to outrun their past by stealing the family car and traveling from West Virginia to Arizona, but the adult world proves mighty difficult to navigate, especially for two kids on their own. Trusting adults has never been an option; no adult has ever given them a good reason. But when Sam meets “Jesus”—who smells an awful lot like a horse—in the park, life takes a different turn. He saved her once, and may be willing to save Sam and her brother again, if only they admit what took place that fateful day in West Virginia. The problem? Sam doesn’t remember, and Jacob isn’t talking.

To purchase Desert Rice, click on the links below:

Desert Rice Paperback Amazon
Desert Rice Kindle Amazon
Barnes and Noble