It’s ironic, when I think about it.
I spent so many years wondering what to do with my life, enduring one dead end job after another.
When I finally hit upon blogging, the decision became what to blog about.
It never occurred to me that writing was what really mattered, more than what I wrote about.
But when I think about it, I have been telling stories and recording my own thoughts for as long as I have been able to pick up a pencil and put something down on paper.
When I was about eight or nine years old, I asked for a typewriter for Christmas, intending to write my own book.
I had asked for a “big book” the year before, meaning one with chapters. My parents got me “365 Days of Bedtime Stories”.
I have disliked short stories ever since.
It turned out that a toy typewriter wasn’t really up to writing “The Great American Novel”. The ribbon was dried out, and tangled easily, and in no time, I was back to good old pencil and paper.
Just before I turned ten, we moved to a new house; one with some very colorful next door neighbors.
I secretly began recording their “adventures” on paper. The stuff practically wrote itself!
Once, they needed a new muffler for their car. I assume that there was no money for such a thing, because they came up with a most ingenious solution: a little wire, the downspout from the gutters, and an exhaust system was produced.
The fact that it didn’t really work was apparently unimportant.
Shortly before summer break, one of my friends, snooping in my room, found my poorly disguised “book” and read the entire thing.
Not only that, she told all of our friends!
Every afternoon, all summer long, I would have a group of kids waiting at my back door, wanting to read the latest installment.
And so, at the age of ten, a writer was born.
That was also the year I decided I was going to hell, but that’s a different story.