In exciting news, I was recently privileged to have an essay published in Redbook Magazine. I don’t have a link to share yet, but I will come back and update this post as soon as I have one. Redbook likes their magazine to be in full circulation before they start posting free articles. Crazy business people. So feel free to go out and buy one! The bonus there is that you can also read another article they published, entitled “Frosty, Boozy, Easy Treats.” Who’s in?

I have always wanted to be a published writer. I’ve had ideas for years about the stories and essays I wanted to craft, and visions of a computer, a coffee cup, and a killer view as I worked (and made actual money) doing the thing I’ve loved to do for as long as I can remember.

As a kid, I played that board game Life, the one where you pick from five different possible careers, and I swear I thought those five were the only careers in existence. Actor, writer, teacher, lawyer, doctor. I suppose I knew there were also farmers and video store employees out there, but that never seemed like the life for me when I was 8 years old and signing my name all over my white bedroom furniture with a pencil, in hopes that I would one day be famous and the wooden boards would be worth something. I was not yet acquainted with the concept of hubris. Or, apparently, with how pencil erasers work.

So I wrote, a little bit for the high school yearbook (truly terrible stuff), a little bit for the college newspaper (no better), back cover copy for travel books once I graduated and got a real job (Marketing Materials Assistant at a book publishing company—decidedly NOT one of the five careers, but quite a lot of fun, mainly due to weekly happy hours at a local pub.) Then blogs, blogs, and more blogs. But none of it made me feel like a writer.

Then boom. ALS. And suddenly I had something that people seemed interested in reading about. Or maybe just something I finally felt confident pitching to an editor. I still have ideas for stories, but when I sit at the computer, it’s always real life that appears on the page in front of me. This is all a long way of saying that although I have ALWAYS known what I wanted to do with my life, I didn’t really start doing it until I got my ugly prognosis. I’m not trying to say I’m great at it, just that it’s what I want to do. And I need more time.

In the case of Redbook, though, the editor came to me. My childhood friend, now the magazine’s Executive Editor, asked if I would contribute. That I was thrilled is an understatement. I wrote about my beautiful sister, and the arc of our lives together, growing up as rivals and partners in crime, becoming best friends as adults, and now, in a new, unexpected phase of life, my dependence on her, my inability to be the big sister I always thought I would be.

Liz was game, thankfully, because she doesn’t typically expose her life online the way that I do. (Although if you’re a friend of hers on Facebook, you know she doesn’t sugarcoat her opinions.) Redbook wanted photos, and we managed to find various shots of one of us holding the other—a strange bit of foreshadowing. The article is called “My Little Sister Carries Me.” I look forward to sharing it here soon. And I look forward to telling more stories, too.

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