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Cybervisit with Gail Gauthier www.gailgauthier.com |
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One day I looked out the window at my cat and the word "ring-tail" popped into my mind. It doesn't sound like much, but it became a story called The Mystery of the Ring-tailed Cat and was published in Cricket. It was my first published short story. |
| I received my copies of the issue with my story the day after I brought my first son home from the hospital. Happy birth day to me. What with running around to the playscape, swimming lessons, library story hours, birthday parties, and nursery school and kindergarten with two small boys I had a lot less time to write over the next few years. Which was just as well because being rejected by every magazine and publishing house in the country gets old after a while. And I was developing a new problem with my writing. My very solemn stories were developing some odd little twists and turns. Characters were doing and saying funny ("strange" and "ha-ha") things. |
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I was also up to my neck in kids, kids, kids because even though I only had two of my own, every child in the neighborhood seemed to end up in my yard. I was also doing lots of Mom stuff like going on field trips and organizing an elementary school science fair. One day I read my boys a book about a man who is terrified because aliens are landing in his yard. I realized that if aliens landed in my yard, I'd hardly notice. I was too busy. It doesn't sound like much, but it became a story called How Mom Saved The Planet and was published in Cricket. I had been writing since fifth grade and managed to get two short stories published. |
| I kept getting more and more ideas about aliens in my yard. I wrote up another story and sent it to some publishing houses. An editor at G. P. Putnam suggested I expand it to a book for middle-grade readers and that was the beginning of My Life Among The Aliens. At last! A book! And then I wrote another! And another! |  |
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So that's how a girl who always thought of herself as a writer actually became one. |
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