Patrice Thomas; that’s me. My mother would always say to her children that we were her mistakes to take care of.  So, earlier this year I finally got up enough nerve, and I lovingly confronted (I use this word loosely) her about calling us, her three children, ‘her mistakes.’ She and all of her 80 plus year old self said: “I made the mistake of laying with a man who laid with too many women and had too many kids. And, I did it twice.” When I think about it, that didn’t really answer the question, but I understood what she meant. Annette’s three children were born and raised on the south side of Chicago, and were the product of the Chicago Board of Education school system. My older brother went on to build a business in the gaming industry, while my twin sister plunged head first into the medical field, following our mom’s footsteps. As for me, I wrote. Our mother may have referred to her three children as her mistakes to take care of, but she is fiercely proud of us. I want to introduce you to my late grandmother for just a second. She was short and round, with the softest skin, and perfect hands. She had a soft voice, and she never seemed to get angry; mad yes, but I had never seen her get angry. Ethel Thomas, that’s her name, was an only child; born in 1916. I pointed out that she was an only child, and in moment you’ll see the importance. Whenever I would go over to her house, she always had a story about her childhood to tell me. She told me all about her laying tar on rooftops; how she loved the boys; how she even picked up the habit of smoking cigarettes; how she met my grandfather, and how he courted her. She told me how she and “Buffalo,” that’s my grandfather’s nickname; how they sang in a quartette and traveled around. What she had never spoke of was her life as a wife, a mother yes, but never about her married life. It wasn’t until I until I was in junior college and wanted to know about my history (well really her history), that she told me what she knew to be true. This came about because, while I was taking an African American Studies class, the professor asked us to talk to the oldest living relative, we knew, and get their story. She was mine. I walked across the street to my grandmother’s apartment; where where’d she cooked some collard greens and cornbread, and neckbones and potatoes. She invited me to stay for dinner, of course I did. I told her what my professor has asked of us; and just like that she told me everything she could remember. How her father stole her mother off her porch when she was just 11 years old, because he thought she was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. How he took her to his mother to raise, so that he could marry her when she became of age; he did. She told me how one of her ancestors was a slave breeder and gave birth to 55 children; 23 for the buck and 32 for the master. She told me what it was like to be the mother of 17 children, and the struggles they endured. She told me about her life! And when she was done speaking, I asked her what it felt like to live to see all 100 grandchildren, 57 great grandchildren, and 27 great-great grandchildren…she said: “I was an only child, now look at me.” My grandmother did not live to me graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia College of Chicago, but I know she knew that I did.  She also did not live to see me write the story of her ancestor, but I know she knew I wrote it. To keep my promise to my late grandmother I wrote and self-published “The American Breeder An Untold Story” in 2016. I have completed a host features and pilots just waiting to be discovered. I am currently working on two new novels: “Finley,” and “Beautiful, The Story of Bintu’s Daughter,” the sequel to The American Breeder An Untold Story. I fell in love with writing when I was about 10 years old because of my 5th grade teacher named Mrs. Jackson. She was known for putting on the school play every year, and everyone who went to JN Thorp Elementary School on the south side of Chicago in the mid 70’s wanted to be in her class for that very reason. I was so happy when I found out that I was going to be in Mrs. Jackson’s class; I would get to be in my first play. Well, that did not happen because our class misbehaved, so it would be the first year a school play would not run (we were bad as hell LOL). After Mrs. Jackson announced that we would not be doing the play, as punishment she made the entire class read the play, we would have performed out loud, and for homework we had to write our own three-page play. After we turned in our homework, the next day Mrs. Jackson picked a script out of the bunch and read it to the class…it happened to belong to me. She told me that I should keep writing, so I did, and by the end of that school year that homework assignment had turned into my first real script of about twenty pages called ‘Living It Up.’ By the time I turned 12 that same script had grown from twenty pages to 350 pages. Believe it or not, it was hand written and I still have every single original page. Here’s the funny thing, when the sitcom “On Our Own” starring Jurnee Smollett and her siblings aired in September of 1995, I realized that that show was the very script idea I had written in the fifth grade as punishment. Of course, my writing has dramatically improved since the fifth grade. What most people would be surprised to learn about me is that I love classic movies and John Wayne westerns. They would really be surprised to learn that I am also a Harry Potter fan. I have what I call ‘my Harry Potter Weekends;’ popcorn, milk duds and HP movies non-stop. Harry Potter is why my Danny Dunkin series exist. I was watching JK Rowling’s bio one day, wishing I was her. Then I asked myself a question out loud: “What’s stopping you?” When I discovered the answered turned out to be ‘me,’ I sat down and wrote Danny Dunkin and The Element of Surprise. Today I have completed five manuscripts for my seven-book series, and self-published the two of the books, which were available on Amazon, but do the lack of sales, I removed them. I have written over forty feature and TV scripts, and my hope is that one day someone will want my work.