And coal, too. That combined with an existential moment in a swimming pool, but most of all it was because of love.

I started out my professional life as a geologist, and that’s where I unexpectedly cut my writing teeth. Turned out I was good at translating scientific jargon into common language. I wrote about coal seams infused with natural gas, oil that dripped from sandstones, and murderously fractured shale.

Eventually, I got bored (a lifelong theme) and parlayed that unexpected talent into a gig as a science journalist. That was fun, but I couldn’t shake my creative urge, which played out in far too many ways. While writing about western gas fields, I dabbled in film-making, painting, poetry, short stories, ceramics — you-name-it. I was an accomplished creative dilettante. And then my mom died, sending me veering off into a chasm of grief.

After a few years of sad sleepwalking through life, I abruptly woke up and found myself in a swimming pool, doing the crawl and propelling myself back and forth, again and again, up and down the length of the pool with a directive reverberating inside my head: just make a decision and stick to it, make a decision, make a decision. The next thing I heard myself thinking was: it will be writing, creative writing will be my art, writing it is. And from that moment until now, I have been writing stories.

But it was love that brought me to genre writing specifically.

This is an excerpt of an interview with Kathleen at Write 1 Sub 1. Read the full piece over at their website.

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