I'm not surprised that I'm here ...

A few months ago my mom and I went to hear Jodi Picoult speak at the Barnes and Noble in the HarMar Mall.

For those of you who don't follow chick literature, Jodi Picoult is a famous author who writes books that somehow seem only to attract women. I think she's really good, and my Mom likes her 'cause she written about families with sick kids.

Anyway, she's a millionaire and she's written a ton of great books. After she read part of her new book, "The Tenth Circle," she had a question and answer session.

Always curious, I had to get a few questions in. One of them was how did she get the motivation to actually sit down and write her first book from start to finish.

She said that she's been writing forever, and started getting short stories published in literary magazines when she was in college. "I'm not surprised that I'm here," she said, referring to being an author. "What surprises me is that you're all here. I knew that I would be writing."

I wanted to get that thought across as the reason I started another blog. I stopped writing my other blog - which I had kept for almost two years - because it became too much of a liability. My parents were going to find out about it, and I was stressed that people at work would too.

I didn't actually think I'd miss blogging though. I write all day at work, but it's never very theraputic and it's not exactly free flowing. I found that even when I wasn't writing blog entries, I kept coming up for ideas for them in my head and writing them when I was running.

This just provides a way for me to purge some of the craziness from my head every night before I go to bed and write about something other than public education.

So in the words of Jodi Picoult, an author that everybody should read, "I'm not surprised that I'm here."