When I started going to school, I started getting used to things, like the language. After that, I started adapting to school, friends, and everything. It was really difficult, to start with, but I survived.
We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches.
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
One thing I do personally started 20 years ago. I started meditating, and I know twice a day I can kind of let everything drop. It's just about being quiet, like drawing back the day, and it allows me to have energy.
I started out doing everything on a custom scale and when that started paying the bills I started making more pieces.
It's kind of too movie-like to say, "When I started climbing, I knew I wanted to climb Everest some day." Instead, I just started rock climbing as a kid, when I was 16, and then I started teaching and a buddy of mine started taking me out.
I always want to pick songs that are really crazy rangy, and sometimes those low notes aren't there. But I started taking it way more seriously after a certain point, and I started doing vocal warm-ups every day, even when I wasn't singing, sometimes twice a day.
The day I stopped worrying about stats is the day I started winning
I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn't have any phone service and we didn't have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.
I started skating because I loved it. I started when I was three and I didn't know all the sacrifices and all the hardships and how difficult day-in and day-out it would be.
I got into one of the Scottish classical styles called piobaireachd, which is a very old music that started around the 1700s or something. I really got into this music. After that, I started to compose bagpipe music in my notations. Then I started building bagpipes by myself, and then I started to perform with the instrument myself in the 1980s.
I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didnt have any phone service and we didnt have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.
A lot of people don't know this, but I started out as a blues-based player, and then, when I realized after playing 18 hours a day that there's more than five notes per scale, that's when my stuff became what it was. I started listening to violinists and flautists, and that's how my style evolved.
I mean, I knew that one day I'd do something writing-oriented as soon as I started writing. But when I started singing, I was determined to make those two work together, so I just worked at it until I started making stuff that sounded like music.
Yes, my pageant career was incredibly short. I started at 19 and was done at 21. I started by competing for Miss California Teen, which I wound up winning, and I literally just entered the contest on a whim!
Then as everything, like I say, things started to come together, when things started to go our way, that's when you results started to come. I was no different driver. I was certainly learning every time I went in the car.