The Ambers inside of me

"There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting."

I fell in love with reading as a kindergartner (thanks, Mom!) and in third grade I fell in love with writing, too, as I started making up my own stupid stories about penguins and teddy bears and anything else that Miss Mason showed us pictures of and told us to write stories about... .

For many years of my childhood, I wanted to be a veterinarian, but my profound allergies to cats forced me to reconsider.

While I've always loved writing, in the past few years as a newspaper journalist and a writer for Malone's alumni magazine (and website and annual report and a host of other things) I've found myself daydreaming enviously of other careers - social work, teaching, counseling, pastoring, hands-on-directly-changing-lives-kinds-of-careers.

But in recent months, God has given me peace, when I choose to look for it, in what I believe is my calling to be a writer. He's helped me realize how, more than anything else, writers have in fact shaped me life and have affected me more than anything else: from Julie Andrews Edwards (Mandy, The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles) to Laura Ingalls Wilder to L.M. Montgomery to John Grisham to C.S. Lewis and Richard Foster and Anne Lammott and Philip Yancey and Lauren Winner.

And even more lately, I've really started to love editing, too. What will become of me?