I Have Authoritie, How About You #BWLPublishing #MFRWAuthor #Authoritis #Nursing #Writing

I HAVE AUTHORITIS. WHAT ABOUT YOU?

Years ago when I was a young nurse, I was admitting a patient. When I asked him why he was here, he said I have authoritis. I knew he met arthritis  but the word stuck with me for years. One day when sick with pneumonia and trapped by winter and a third floor attic apartment, my sister-in-law sent me a shopping bag full of books – all nurse romances. She liked them and thought since I was a nurse, so would I. There were perhaps two I really liked, maybe three that were all right, but most of them were not to my taste. The writers knew nothing about nurses, hospital and nursing care. They saw no difference between an aide, a LPN or a registered nurse. That day I decided to embrace the authoritis that had been floating in my unconscious mind for years.

     I sat down and began to write. I’ve always enjoyed playing with words and have been known to add scenes to my supposed dry case studies. I put conversations with the patients in these. My instructors never marked me down but they did note that these weren’t stories I was telling. But they were.

     An itis is a kind of disease. Think of dermatitis. It’s like an itch and so is authoritis. There’s an itch to write down words, turning them into sentences, paragraphs, scenes and chapters. This itch must be scratched regularly. And I do. Sometimes the scenes work and sometimes they need to be reworked.

     The cover for Murder and Mint Tea is one of the first I wrote back then. So was Past Betrayals, Past Loves but that book languished for years as a yellow carbon copy until I decided to rework it.

      Now the spellchecker is telling me this isn’t a word but I know it is. So does anyone who has that itch to write.  I have authoritis. How about you? Are you afflicted, too?