Welcome to Gail 's Story!

I started this Gail’s Story blog in the summer of 2021 as an experiment. After what seemed like a lifetime of technical writing and editing, I wanted to try my hand at creative writing—to write stories for an audience that was wider than my annual Christmas letter list.

After a year of positive feedback from my readers and subscribers, I got more serious and took the plunge—I started to submit my essays to journals, newspapers, and anthologies in the hopes of getting published. Success finally came in 2024, when my nonfiction essay entitled “Racing to a Full Stop” was accepted to be included in the Houston Writers Guild anthology Journey Into Time, released in October 2024. My first publication!

By then I was already deep into the editing of my first book: Art and Artifice: A Memoir—A Story of Love, Deception, and Healing on the Texas Gulf Coast. I finished the first draft while on vacation in the Bahamas in December 2022, and the next 3 years were spent working with beta readers, a developmental editor, and many, many edits of the manuscript by yours truly before I finally deemed it finished. It was published in August 2025.

I continue to add to this collection of real-life essays, which focus on the amazing, funny, heart-wrenching, or absurd situations in life that stay with us—because we learned lessons, or the people we encountered made an indelible impression on us that we remember years later. Maybe we reversed course because of life-altering circumstances that were out of our control. These are the stories that fascinate me and the ones that I think are worth telling.

A word about my tagline: “true tales of a wind-tossed life.” When I started this blog, I was 4 years out from surviving the devastation of Hurricane Harvey on the Texas Gulf Coast. An event like that makes an impression on a person, and it became a metaphor for everything that had gone before in my life. I needed a tagline for this blog, and it just seemed to fit what I was writing about. When it came time to put a formal stamp on a business name for my writing endeavor in 2025, I stuck with that theme and Wind-Tossed Tales, LLC was born.

And, of course, I love books. I love reading books, talking about books, and writing about books. Hence, there is a Book Reviews section that gets added to regularly.

For more information on my background and current projects, please take a look at my About Me page. Also, if you have a story you’d like to share here, I’m always open to that. Take a look at my Submit page.

I hope you enjoy what you read here! If you do, please share my posts via email and on your social media sites. You can also follow me on Facebook and subscribe to my Substack (free and paid options). 

Finally, if you don’t want to miss the next blog post or newsletter, be sure to subscribe to my mailing list!

I’ll meet you in the Comments section,

Gail Bergan