Here Be Dragons by Melanie Shankle

Author:Melanie Shankle [Shankle, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PRH Christian Publishing
Published: 2025-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

No Good Comes in the Comments

Most people who love to write also love to read. I am no exception. From my earliest memory, I devoured every book I was given, and there was really no greater joy than time spent in a B. Dalton Bookseller store at the mall. I loved every book written by Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. Those women shaped my view of humor and how to tell a funny story. They were my version of childhood heroes and the original influences that made me want to write books. If I could capture the magic I felt the first time I ever read about Fudge Hatcher or Ramona Quimby, I could sell it for at least twenty-five dollars.

Then, when I was about nine or ten years old, I found a book sitting on the end table in our living room. It was a hardcover book with brightly colored cherries all over the cover and a cartoon housewife in a bathrobe lying in the middle of them all. It was If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? by Erma Bombeck. I can only assume I judged a book by its cover when I picked it up and decided to read it, but nothing prepared me for what was inside. Looking back, I’m not sure why as an elementary school kid I knew to appreciate how brilliant and funny that author was as she wrote about things like carpooling, making dinner, packing lunches, and being married. I just know that reading her words opened a door to a whole new world for me. I discovered her daily column in the newspaper and read it before I left for school every morning. When I look back at the influences that made me want to write, Erma Bombeck is chief among them. She helped me realize that you can make anything funny if you tell it the right way.

So fast-forward to July 2005. Caroline was just a month shy of her third birthday, and I was living my worst life as a pharmaceutical salesperson. It turns out it’s hard to sell products to people if you don’t enjoy making small talk or, you know, selling things. During my maternity leave, in a quest to compile some quality information about how to get one’s baby to sleep through the night, I’d discovered what the people were calling “mommy blogs.” It became part of my daily routine to read these posts by normal, everyday women writing about their lives. I was hooked. Part of the attraction was that reading their words made me feel less alone as I navigated being a new mom, but it was also that there was this new avenue for an ordinary person to put their writing out on a public platform that didn’t require having a publishing deal. I had wanted to be a writer since childhood but had no idea how to make that a reality. No one, including

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