I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. Before I knew what craft was, before I understood genre or structure or audience, I knew how to take a feeling and turn it into words. I knew how to pick up a pencil and make sense of the world by shaping it into sentences. Poetry, short stories, scraps of dialogue — whatever came, I wrote it down.

At night, ideas would flood my mind like visitors who refused to wait until morning. Characters, plots, entire trilogies would show up uninvited, demanding to be heard. I’d wake up and reach for whatever was closest — a notebook, a receipt, the back of an envelope — scribbling down every thought before it slipped away. Writing wasn’t a hobby. It was a pulse. A rhythm. A truth I carried even when I didn’t know what to do with it.

I dreamed of seeing my books on shelves at the library, stacked on tables in a bookstore, tucked into the aisles of a grocery store where someone might pick one up on a whim and find themselves changed. I dreamed of readers finding pieces of themselves in my stories, the way I once found myself in the voices of the writers who shaped me.

I wanted my poems to be known like Maya Angelou — full of truth, full of breath, full of something that lingers long after the last line.
I wanted my stories to feel as real and relatable as Terry McMillan’s, the kind that leap from page to screen because they speak to something universal.
I wanted to make people think the way Baldwin, bell hooks, and Toni Morrison made people think — deeply, critically, expansively.
I wanted to capture a love affair with the same fire as Zane, Eric Jerome Dickey, and Omar Tyree — stories that pull you in and refuse to let go.

So many lives I’ve lived through books.
So many stories that touched me — The Darkest Child, Perfect Peace, and countless others that carved their way into my memory.
I wanted to be among them.
I still want to be among them.

For years, I told myself I didn’t have time. Life was happening, responsibilities were heavy, and writing — the thing that made me feel most like myself — kept getting pushed to the side. But dreams don’t disappear just because we ignore them. They wait. Patiently. Quietly. Persistently.

And mine has waited long enough.

Today, I’m choosing differently.
Today, I’m choosing me.
Today, I’m making time.

Not someday.
Not when things slow down.
Not when life becomes easier or clearer or more convenient.

Now.

The dream that’s lived in me since childhood deserves space, attention, and breath. It deserves to grow. It deserves to become real.

So let the writing begin — again, and this time with intention.

— Leigh C. Mitchell