Melissa Grant Writes

What was I thinking?

I’m not a journalist; this is nuts!

How am I responsible for informing all these people? I was in RETAIL for years. I’m actually kind of dumb; ask anyone.

Imposter syndrome hit me HARD. It was all fun and games writing about critters and funny stories, but now I had to write about council meetings?

WTF?

I do enjoy Living Snoqualmie. I really do. Do I enjoy writing about city council or school board meetings in general? Absolutely not. But do I enjoy it if there is an extraordinarily meaty or controversial topic, or if someone seems to be hiding something?

Now we’re talking.

Like some of my epic saga books I read in my twenties and thirties, if there is a topic that requires a lot of snoopy research and a dining room table stacked full of papers, I’m all in. Public records requests are my jam.

However, after 5-ish years, my brain wanted to be goofy again; it wanted to live in a world with fewer facts and more fun. I live in fear of retractions. I don’t ever want to misquote or mislead. Getting it wrong keeps me up at night. I am always on alert. I feel responsible for all the things. If the pass is closed for bad weather, I will stay up and wait for it to reopen to update an article.

Meanwhile, all the elderly people in my life started to have problems and die. My brain needed a break, a hard reset.

I was, for lack of a better term, creatively constipated

Last June, during some horrid hot weather, in the midst of a lot of heavy stuff, and everyone on earth wanting me to ‘go sit out on the patio and enjoy the weather.’

I snapped.

See, in the PNW, since the weather is what some may term bad for nine months out of the year, there is a huge amount of pressure to ‘enjoy’ the summer.

I just don’t.

So, one night (was there a large amount of wine involved? perhaps) I sat down and decided to let my crabby flag fly and write my villain origin story.

Enter Cloudia Gray, scowling and squinting stage left.