The First Dash of Ash

For well over a year now, I've been posting photos on Spare-Time Shooter. It started as the forum for playing 26 things and continued as an irregular posting place for the latest of my shooting expeditions. I realized recently that it was ironic for me to have a blog for my burgeoning photography hobby and not one for my lifelong love of writing. I didn't pick up the camera seriously until I was about 24 or 25. But I picked up a pen when I was six.

And I followed the pen from poetry in high school to fiction in college and ultimately into grad school where I spent three years on a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing - best know by its shorthand "MFA" and a variety of disparaging nicknames like "Masters of Failed Artists" and "Masters of Forgotten Authors." In truth, I probably fall more into one of the later categories, having long-since abandoned any notions of "being a writer" in favor of just being. My grad school years read like a cautionary tale of being a big fish from a small pond who drowned in a sea of comparatively better writers. The happy ending is that I was able to reincarnate as a relatively normal human being who gets to play with words at work and rather shamelessly enjoy pulp romance novels instead of The Notables of the Esteemed Literary Canon.

So now, I'm an almost-30 gal who loves words and pictures (almost equally), laughs too loudly, enjoys nothing so much as a good pun, who plans to put her MFA (failed and forgotten) to work from time to time. And as for the blog's name, I'm a notorious user of the emdash - that little guy in between phrases when writers like me want to interrupt themselves - and I like to think I do it with style.