Craft Introduction to The Writer’s Toolbox with Dawn Chandler

I was born in Coffeyville KS, a little town almost on the Oklahoma Border and the infamous town of the attempted double bank robbery of the Dalton Gang, their final showdown. I moved away from Coffeyville when I was only 7 but have been back for a visit and very much enjoyed the Dalton Museum. I always thought I should have been born in the Wild West. We moved to Idaho when we left Kansas and I grew up on Murtaugh Lake, where my father was the dam keeper and ditch rider. I spent my days in the lake, swimming, catching fish, frogs, and tadpoles, from sunup to sundown most days. Not hard to imagine that my first full-length novel was about a mermaid. At nights I would spend time watching football with my dad or cooking with my mom. In 8th grade, I had a teacher, Mrs. Smith, who wanted me to publish some of my short stories. Looking back on it through the perfect looking glass of time I should have done it. When I first started writing in class, I hated it. I had to write their way and only their way--in the correct process, outline, rough draft, and so on. Over the progressing years, I have learned that I am a pantser, but in the beginning, I just thought that writing was not for me. I could not, no matter how I tried, get the outline done. I could not sit and sketch out a whole story from beginning to end, but if I just sat and wrote I could get the first draft out without a problem, but the teachers didn't want me to do it that way. I really began to love writing when I met Mrs. Smith and she cared more about my writing and my stories than she did about my process. She told me to write in whichever order I wanted, she understood me as a writer and didn't push me to be something I wasn't. I have been writing ever since.
When I am not writing I love swimming, camping, exploring, spending time with family and friends, hiking, drawing, painting, teaching, biking, reading (a vastly wide variety of authors, my favorite though is Stephen King), and traveling, for now the country but soon the world. Today I am busily writing my novels, From Under a Dark Shadow, the second in my Dark Series book will be completed soon, with plenty more to follow as time and my muse allows.