Guest Blog - Living the Dream

written by: Shanon Grey

I was thinking back, oh these many years, to all the things I wanted to be when I grew up. My first memory is of an Indian. That was because my “boyfriend” had just gotten a pair of six shooters for his sixth birthday and I wanted to show him up with a bow and arrow. I did, too. With my long blonde hair in braids, I sent that arrow flying and the rubber sucker stuck right in the middle of his forehead. His mother wouldn’t let him play with me for two whole weeks. I was devastated. I moved on to being a bareback rider for the circus which, I’ll have you know, I practiced for on the Indian pony (the Indian theme was obviously sticking in the back of my mind) I got when I was eleven. When my new stepmother saw me standing on top of Silver (we won’t go there), she shrieked so loud I fell off right into the trough. For that, I was grounded for two weeks. Do you see a theme here? As I got older, it became an airline stewardess, a racecar driver, a policewoman (I’m old), a doctor, and a teacher. I am sure there were many, many others in between.

You might notice that none of those was writer. That never crossed my mind. Why? Because what I knew of writers came from a very strict, narrow perception of what a good writer was. They had to write for the Post or the Times or become the elite novelist, which I promise you, didn’t include anything I would have enjoyed writing. It wasn’t until I left home and discovered a whole other world of fiction that I began toying with the idea. One of the things that fed the idea of writing was all those things I’d wanted to be when I grew up.

As an author, I can be (well, at least my characters can be) all the various things I’ve ever dreamed of and more. I think the Indian thing might be off the table. Maybe not. Ironically, Native Americans feature strongly in my stories about Ruthorford and the Gatekeepers so, yes, I even have that ~ minus the bow and arrow. I don’t believe anyone would trust me with a bow and arrow to this day.

Looking back, I see that my desires centered around strong women. In my stories, my characters, not only the heroines, are strong people. In The Shoppe of Spells, Morgan has been leading a quiet, relatively normal life, when she is yanked from that world into a world she never knew existed and she if forced to play a major role in what happens around her. I love that. I love having characters who have to discover themselves, especially when they have no idea of their potential.

So, in my world, I am still the bareback rider atop the white stallion leaping through rings of fire, or the doctor closing in on a cure. In the world I create, my characters have begun to use far more of their brains and have developed abilities that we can only pretend to understand. What I enjoy is that fact that these are normal, everyday people dealing with extraordinary circumstances and having to adjust to what they are becoming. In The Shoppe of Spells, Morgan finds out that she can see auras and, from that, determine a person’s health. That sounds wonderful ~ until she inadvertently blinks and is looking at her parents in a way she really never intended. I let my characters have their dreams while keeping their shortcomings.

As for me, I continue to think of all the things I want to do when I grow up and, because of the written word, I get to go out and do them.

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Thank you, Shanon! You can buy her latest novel "Shoppe of Spells" at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.