HANNAH RAY THOMAS
A Southern California based creative writer.
Empathic
Imaginative
Analytical
intuitive
How It All Began...
I wrote my first short story when I was eighteen. I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember feeling proud of my work, so I took it to show my mother.
Mom was, as she always seemed to be, in the kitchen. It was a bright, Southern California Sunday morning, and she was pouring batter into a hot pan for pancakes. She poured and flipped but listened attentively while I read my story out loud. When I was done, she turned to me and said, “You should write.”
That moment had an incredible impact on me, one I still carry around to this day in heart and mind. I wish I could say that moment also inspired me to continue what would become a lifetime of career fiction writing.
But I can’t.
Instead, the distractions of youth with its spotlight on friends and crushes, the demands of college, marriage, divorce, single parenthood, and all the usual things that consume our lives took up my time. It is also possible I just didn’t have the discipline to put my butt to the chair and do the work, but that is a confession for another time.
Over the years...
I took writing classes and attend writing conferences, brainstormed storylines and developed characters, compiled research and took notes, made observations, and gathered facts, all done with the intention to write the stories I had in mind to tell. But apart from some journalistic pieces that I wrote freelance from time to time, I never published any works of fiction.
In 2020, after several years of caregiving for my elderly parents, they passed away. I realized then, in a way that I had never realized before, that until the moment we take our very last breath, we want to live our very best life. Had my father survived his heart attack that night, he would have woken up the next morning and asked mom to make him pancakes. I want to wake up tomorrow and make pancakes, and then take the time that I have left on this Earth to write my stories.
I created this website as an outlet to talk about my love for the craft of writing, and to showcase my work. I approach it now with the experience of a lifetime behind me and the excitement of putting imagination to paper ahead of me. I hope you will stick around so we can enjoy the process together, and just like a stack of pancakes, I hope my storytelling for you will be warm sweet and satisfying.
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