I’ll make this quick. Since switching over to a personal blog site I have not blogged ONCE. Why? I have no clue, humans are a strange species, especially when you consider how much time I spent designing that page! No matter the reason, at the end of the day, it’s about making sure the words are still flowing from your fingertips, whether that’s on a sparkly new site or drab platform is of little–wait, NO consequence.

In short, I am back. Here. No let’s get to the post.

I couldn’t be silent on what would have been Ray Bradbury’s 100th birthday were he alive. Maybe you’ve read this story or maybe not, but Bradbury’s words electrified my writing career into being. I was about 20 when I was assigned to read “There Will Come Soft Rains.” I was in community college, having graduated high school with no inkling about what I wanted to do. I had a fantastic English professor at the time, and my love for the language led me to explore a class on fiction by a less than enthusiastic professor (who taught me plenty just the same) by encouraging me to explore the world of short stories.

That’s when Bradbury came along. I didn’t grow up reading or aspiring to be a writer like a great deal of the people I would go on to meet while pursuing my creative writing degree, but the sensitivity and depth of Bradbury’s work taught me that it wasn’t too late to start. That single story about a self-sufficient house going about its routine; making breakfast, reciting the date, opening a garage door expectantly though the family that lived there had been wiped out by a nuclear blast…it has stayed with me a decade later.

My mom and uncle tried to talk me out of pursuing an arts education, but I was stubborn and wouldn’t have it. And I realize that I’m not an accomplished or even published fiction writer/author, but you know what? I have no regrets going after what I loved. It’s only while writing this post that I’m realizing how irrelevant success is in the face of passion (you see, this is exactly why I need my blog child). It is so easy to lose sight of loving something for what it brings to you emotionally when you’re trying to push it to pave your way financially.

Because of Bradbury, I would come home at 10:30pm from working in mentally taxing environment and write. All my fears, all my grief, all my frustrations would go right onto a blank page on the screen. I wasn’t too tired. You never are when you’ve fallen in love.

That one, brilliant man, led an aimless girl in community college to pursue writing, take a stab at writing a book, and falling irrevocably in love with words enough to become a librarian to spread the same joy to others.

What more can I say than you changed my life, Ray Bradbury.

Thank you, and happy birthday.