When asked how I became a writer, my reply is always: “These people came to live in my head and they wouldn’t go away until I told their stories.” You see, I am not one of those writers who knew from grade school she wanted to be a writer. I don’t have tattered manuscripts from the fourth grade or even the twelfth. No. I was strictly a reader until my mid-thirties. Like a lot of people, I had trouble sleeping, and one night as I stared at the ceiling a man appeared in my vision. He stood at a window, and in the background were billowing smokestacks. He turned and looked at me, and said, “This wasn’t the way my life was supposed to turn out.” Immediately, I wondered what happened in his life. After that every night I wrote stories in my head about why his life turned out badly. I wish I’d written them down, but at the time, I didn’t know how to form a story. A few weeks later, I found a card in a magazine advertising Writers Digest and subscribed to it. I devoured every article each month, paying particular attention to the fiction writers….