Author! Author!

How I Came to Write
By Kathy Pratt

My interest in books began early in my life. I was read to by my parents and grandparents, and we didn’t have a television until I was around ten years old, so I listened to stories on the radio until I was able to read. I still don’t watch television, preferring instead to curl up on the sofa with a good book while everyone else is tuned into the TV.

I grew up in Indianola, Iowa, and got my first library card in the second grade. The library in our town was a red brick Carnegie library. As a little girl, the ceilings looked so tall to me that they seemed to stretch up to the sky. The first book I checked out was Tom Sawyer, followed in a few days by Huckleberry Finn. I’d tried to check them both out at the same time, but the librarian wouldn’t let me, thinking it would take me weeks to read them. I quickly became a voracious reader and would read everything I could find written by authors I discovered. I was in the fifth grade when I read every book the library had by Edna Ferber.

I spent my last Iowa summer curled up in an old wing back chair reading Gone With the Wind over and over again. We moved to California when I was fourteen and I started high school that year. One of my first classes was American literature, and I discovered John Steinbeck. I’ve read every book and short story he wrote at least once, some of them several times. My uncle lived in Northern California and we’d make the drive up the San Joaquin Valley several times a year. I’d pass the miles by staring out the car window and making up stories about the people and places we passed along the way. Many of those stories were inspired by something I’d read in a John Steinbeck novel.

My interest in writing started in junior high school when I began to be assigned creative writing lessons. Those classes were some of my favorites all through school. In college, my instructors encouraged me to write but I didn’t begin to seriously pursue writing as a possible career until the last five years. Prior to that time I’d written articles for nursing journals, travel logs for the newspaper, and short stories. Initially I made all the mistakes a writer can make. I figured all you had to do to write a novel was...write it. So, that’s what I did. I wrote the novel of my heart, and once it was completed, I promptly sent it out to a couple of houses and was just as promptly rejected. Thoroughly discouraged, I found an agency that charged ME to read my book and consider whether to represent me. Three hundred dollars later I received another rejection letter with a small paragraph of suggestions on how to edit it. Discouraged, I put that manuscript away and gave up on becoming a writer. Instead, I returned to college with the goal of getting a degree in English Literature.

I am a Registered Nurse and have worked more years than I care to admit to, in just about every area of nursing from rehabilitation to drug detoxification, to ICU/CCU, and now hospice.

This has provided me with a wealth of first-hand knowledge on human behavior under extreme circumstances. I draw from these experiences when I am creating my characters and situations in my works. In planning for the second half of my life, I returned to school to become a teacher. A couple of years into my post-graduate studies I decided that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I really wanted to be a writer--I just didn’t know how to go about it. That’s when I discovered extension programs in colleges, writer’s conferences, writer’s organizations, and critique groups. I’ve taken writing courses at UC Irvine and California State University Fullerton, and am a member of Romance Writer’s of America. I’m also an active member of the Orange County Chapter of RWA. I find my Monday evening critique group meetings invaluable.

My brothers and my mother are also writers. Mom has been published in retirement magazines and Chicken Soup for the Soul books. My two brothers are newspaper columnists, following in the footsteps of my uncle, who was also a newspaper columnist.

I prefer writing women’s fiction. Medicinal Remedies is a medical thriller with romantic elements. The protagonist, Kristy, is a Registered Nurse.

Kathy Pratt is a registered nurse who holds a BSN degree and PHN (Public Health Nursing) certificate. She spent fourteen years working the night shift in an Intensive Care/Coronary Unit in a Southern California hospital, where MEDICINAL REMEDIES was born. She returned for post-graduate studies in English Literature and transitioned into studying fiction writing at both Cal State University, Fullerton and UC Irvine. Pratt is the co-author of CONVERSATIONAL ENGLISH (published by Gummerus Publishing in Finland) and has been published in The American Journal of Nurses, the Sacramento Valley Mirror, and in the Whittier Daily News. Married with two adult children, Pratt currently resides in Fullerton, CA where she works part-time as a hospice nurse and pursues her writing career during the rest of her waking hours.

Medicinal Remedies by Kathy Pratt is available for purchase at the DPPstore (www.dppstore.com)