An Introduction, I Presume?

Well, hello!  I'm new here.  I'm all fluttery feeling right now. This is totally first day at a new school type jitters, sans my wearing strange 80's paraphernalia like a pair of high tops or bangs sprayed and tamped down with a gallon of Aqua Net.  So I assume I need to tell you all about myself while you apply Lip Smackers and snap your gum, eh?

Here goes.

My name is Sara Rose, which I go by in real life.  In the blogosphere I also go by Chatterbox Sara, The Chatterbox, and White Chrysanthemum (pen name sorta).  I have guested on a few blogs and write for my own and several side projects.  More on those later.

I live in Satan's Left Arm Pit, also known as Vermillion South Dakota.  The easiest way to describe it is totally confusing and complex.  We're in the middle of corn and soy fields on the Plains and we're a college-meets-farm-meets-trailer park sort of town.  Thats what there is here- a university and its respective students, a lot of farms, and miles upon miles of trailers.  We even live in one.  Awesome, huh!

I never meant to end up here.  See, my parents were the free wheeling hippie kids who happened to actually make money so we lived all sorts of places but basically ended up back here when I was about 12 going on 13.  It was a strange sort of culture shock to come to South Dakota.  People eat things like chislic, wear beer goggles to weddings, and rail about being a red state.  Huzzah!

I'm not built for small town living for the most part.  I prefer anonymity, I prefer to be seen in a crowd, I want culture, but there are aspects of rural living that do agree with me.  I love the geography here, I really prefer being close to nature, etc., but there's only so many potluck dishes a gal can eat.  Anyways, I ended up in Vermillion via an unlikely turn of events.

When I was 18 my dad killed himself.  I basically spent a few years in college, in pageants, travelling Europe, and just avoiding myself.  I met a guy, thought I was in looooooooove, and decided to "get it together" and follow him to school here.  Well "getting it together" meant breaking up, start sleeping with a guy who was a loser and getting pregnant.  Funny how that worked to actually make me get it together.

Baby Daddy and I decided he sholuld terminate his parental rights and contact with my daughter, Eva.  She's amazing.  She's like fire, in human form, really.  Then I met my husband, we eloped, and have been happily at each others throats ever since.  I just had my son, Owen, he's now 12 weeks old and he's already very opposite his sister in so many ways.  In the meantime I got a perfectly useless degree in psychology and worked in an organization for developmentally disabled people as a glorified social worker.

That didn't last long.  It's a high stress/quick burnout environment because you spend your days fighting the system for decent care for people and get told to "stick to procedure" and make them look good on paper.  I decided to go back to school for nursing.  My husband is finishing a masters for software design and I wanted a job I could take everywhere.

I've always been a writer.  From a very young age, I realized I wanted to work writing into my life plan somehow.  However, I had one of those evil fathers who enjoys destroying dreams so I backburnered that for a very long time.  When I met my husband I decided to actively start writing again in bits and pieces.  I blogged and journaled and have slowly been building up from there.  This last summer, I realized that nursing would never be a career or a passion for me, just a j-o-b and that I was going to make myself miserable if I continued to head down that path.

There were lots of other factors behind this as well, but basically a few months ago, while on bed rest with being pregnant, I started sending out query letters, emails, ads, signing up for all sorts of networking for my blog, you name it.  As I was in the thick of an existential pseudo-quarter-life crisis, suddenly I started hearing back from people . . . who wanted me to write for them, freelance, write on my own, etc.  It was like a sign from God, honestly.

So I dumped nursing down the drain.  And, here I am.  I'm so glad to have found you!  I have a special request too.  Do you all have backlinks wiuth your own introductions, so that I may read them?  I'm so happy to have found an environment where I can write, track my progress, assign myself some goals, and help other people do the same.  This sort of community effort from other writers is exactly what I needed and I'm glad to be here.

Phew.  There.  I did it.  Now did my scrunchie look ok?  Tee hee!

xoxo-

Sara Rose