I can remember specifically the first word I ever wrote. My grandmother had an old typewriter in her office, and that was the room the kids would all scurry off to play during family gatherings. Occasionally, I would power up the typewriter to listen to the tactile pounding of the keys into the paper. I did not know yet how to read, but I kept hammering the keys into endless strings of gibberish. When my grandmother entered the room, she said, “Oh look, you wrote the word pig.” Maybe not the most poetic first word, but that was the start of it all. Over three decades, I’ve completed three unpublished novels, and I keep striving everyday to edit, polish, and try to get a literary agent’s interest. It’s been a long journey since those days of hammering gibberish into a typewriter, but somedays, it doesn’t feel that long ago, at all.