You’ve seen this (I know you have), either in movies or in real life: a person approaches the edge of a body of water, and instead of jumping right in, they…dip their toe to get a sense of the temperature and determine whether to splash or ease in or turn around and leave water-play to everyone else.

That’s what this perspective-writing-through-blogging thing has become for me.

I haven’t decided to leave the water-play to others, but rather to ease in (a toe, a foot, an ankle, the other toe, the other foot…)

This “toe-dipping” mirrors how my love for writing took off. My classmates bemoaned it, but I rather liked my English-Lit classes and the related writing assignments (hence the influence of my Viv Phillips character). Undercover, I enjoyed the post-reading discussions about characters, setting, and symbolism, while overcover (ha-ha) I complained and co-signed on the bemoaning (as sophomores in high school are bound to do).

Remember Cliff’s Notes? Yeah, those little yellow books could be spotted in many a locker, but the teacher always, always had questions not covered in those books—resulting in long silences in the classroom after the question(s) posed. I avoided answering book discussion questions (even when I knew the answer), to fit in. Ahh, the pitfalls of peer pressure…

Nevertheless, my love for reading and those English-Lit assignments also fed my desire to write. Ahh…the advantages of peer pressure.

My toe-dipping with the written word outside of academic instruction started with personal essays about life events, interspersed with poetry—major surges of self-conscious embarrassment when I read those today. It wasn’t until adulthood that I went the toe-foot-ankle-leg-body route and decided to write a novel. The water was quite chilly at first, but I’ve been wading around for a bit now and things are starting to warm up…

I’m amid my fiction series featuring Dr. Naomi Alexander, and Viv’s weaved all through it—love for language arts and all.