Kelli gets published!

I grew up on magazines - fashion, fitness, anything design related, et cetera. During junior high, my single mom owned her own business. I would be dropped off by the bus driver outside of her industrial park office where I would wait for 2-3 hours and fold shirts, run errands and read a lot of magazines. I didn't find books of interest at that age nor did I find my studies. The teachers didn't believe in me so why should I care? My mom always told us kids that 'we'd turn out really well, she just knew it' so we therefore didn't need to plan for college because once we graduated, we would own a business like she does and make a living that way. She suggested we run a sandwich truck, espresso stand (prevalent in Seattle) or take over her business of silk screening/ embroidery. I was never cut out for that and always said I wanted to work in an office environment where I knew that I wouldn't come home smelling like grease or paint thinner. To get to my point, in 8th grade I had a homework assignment to do in history class. It consisted of picking a generation and writing a newspaper to reflect the events. A friend and I chose the 70s and wrote the paper together covering everything from the tawdry details of Nixon to the flashy flared legs coming into fashion. We submitted the project and failed because the teacher thought we plagiarized the whole thing. With all of my experience reading magazines, I had a pretty good idea of tone and context and was competent enough to write it myself. My A student friend was furious and told the teacher that she didn't plagiarize - she got a B+ on the paper. My grade never changed nor did I have the self-esteem to ask for it to be. It's funny that is one of the main things I remember from my junior high experience.

Although I had a short stint as a personal training writer for a CBS affiliate website in Seattle (the website went away), I have made a strange challenge to write into magazines to see if I can get published. It has worked for local and company magazines and newspapers, granted, I have done this maybe once per year. Today, I received an email from Shape magazine asking to confirm the spelling of my name. That's right, my comment will be in the July 2006 Shape Magazine. Too funny. OK, so I'm not getting published in the New Yorker (yet) but it is fun.

An old friend of mine used to attend many Microsoft functions (she wasn't nicknamed Party Patty for nothin') and would find out where the cameras were and she would always be in the background kind of like 'Where's Waldo'. Each week I would read the weekly paper and most often I could find a picture of her slyly walking in the background but smiling at the camera. To me, my writing into magazines is the same amount of fun - let's see what I can do without anyone really noticing.

Love,
Me.