Hello. My name is Andrea and I’m a writer.
It took me a long time to convince myself that I could call myself a writer. It seemed too big and important and I did not feel worthy of the title. Obviously, I’ve overcome that.
England is where my wifi router is which is where I call home for the moment. I live with my husband and two doodles in a lovely cottage in Surrey where I feel like I’m on a writing retreat every day. I’ve lived in Brazil and Singapore and traveled the world as much as we’ve had time and money for. I will always be a Texas girl at heart. It’s true what they say, “You can take the girl out of Texas but you can’t take Texas out of the girl.”
I’m not sure when I started writing. I do remember always loving stories. I remember thinking and dreaming in parables from an early age but I’m not sure if I wrote much down on actual paper. If I did, my mom probably has it. She has always been such an encourager of my writing. (Thanks, Mom!)
As a teenager, I did not enjoy reading much. I had comprehension issues in grade school and they were never really addressed. That could have had something to do with my birthday falling 2 days before the cut-off date for the next school year. I used to wish my parents had held me back a year. I don’t fault them for not doing so because well, in that era, you only held kids back if they had serious learning disabilities. Mine weren’t serious and weren’t even discovered or discussed. I was always the youngest, the last to date, the last to drive, and I had to work so hard to keep up in all areas social and academic. I forged my way through my academic life quietly on as many back rows as I was allowed to. I didn’t particularly enjoy much about school at all.
Reading books is hard for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love books. I love touching them, smelling them and thumbing through all the adventures their words contain. I plan to write one or two someday and I truly hope you’ll read them when I do. When I’m reading a book, my mind wanders. It either gets trapped in beautiful phrasing or it takes me somewhere else I hadn’t planned on going. Often it’s somewhere I needed to go, but it’s a side trip, nonetheless. Where some people eat books up for lunch, my intake is more like a multi-course gourmet feast where every morsel is pushed around over all of the taste buds, processed and savored.
If I do ever write a book, I plan for it to have short chapters. And all my fellow self-diagnosed ADD’ers say, “thank you!”. I love small bites. I love short chapters. I get excited when I pick up a book with chapters that are only 3-4 pages long. Even better if the print is large. Because… hello 50-year-old old eyes! While I can’t eat a whole book for lunch, I can take in and digest a short chapter with large letters. Very satisfying.
Perhaps this is why I love blogs so much. Blogs are basically short chapters.
As an older teenager and into young adulthood, I wrote poetry and songs. The writing slowed to a crawl as I began to live my bigger and more important story of being a wife and mom to three. As you can see, our family has grown. My heart is full but will always have room for more. (How’s that for a not so subtle grandma hint?)
It is now, as I enter the empty nest season, that the words have returned, often they flow like from a fire hydrant. I have time to pursue this long-time passion of processing life through my fingertips. I am grateful.
“Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and fingertips.” Dawson Trotman
You’ll see on my home page the various blogs I have. My self-diagnosed ADD is fairly apparent by the variety. My life is full therefore my brain is full. I love to live stories and I love to share them; both through my words and through my photography (I’m an amateur with a great camera). It is in the sharing of stories that we find a shoulder of comfort to lean on and take a breath and encouragement for our feet to take our next step as we live out our own stories. Our lives matter. Our stories matter. A story worth living is a story worth sharing.
Feel free to peruse the smorgasbord of menu items I’ve set out for you. Follow me on social media. I hope you will enjoy your “lunch”.
Andrea Stunz… she breaths therefore she writes. It’s a healthy addiction.
This is where you say, “Hello, Andrea!”
Click here to contact me via email.
