Writing My Life Away

I usually spend a few days this time of year reviewing what I have done the past year and what I may do in the coming year. Since I have seen over seven decades of New Years Day, I guess I have some practice in that endeavor.

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Anyway, I was looking at my Substack dashboards and noticed that even though I have not posted in months, I have gained a few followers. Seeing this, I have determined that I should fire this forum back up and start posting. I will be uploading mostly the same content as I was, only from time to time I plan to post pieces like this. Some will be funny, some will be serious and others may be completely off the wall. It will depend on how the earth is spinning that day.

While marketing my books I attend many craft shows, author fairs and other events to hawk my books. People often ask me how I got started writing. I usually mumble something incoherent and move on.

However, the question remains, how did I get started writing.

I guess it all started when I was quite young. My mother was a reader and visited the library in a small town near us called Osgood to borrow books. After I learned to read, she took me with her. The library was small; however, the librarian was nice and steered me to the children’s section.

There I was introduced to Dr. Seuss and other writers whose works catered to young ones. Thus, a tradition began that went on throughout my childhood. Mom would take me to the library, I would fill a grocery bag, the old, paper ones, with books. Two weeks later it was time to return them, and I would fill up another sack of books. As I got older, we moved to a larger town called Batesville. Batesville had a larger library and an equally nice librarian who discovered quickly what I liked and she would immediately show me any new arrivals that fit my tastes.

By this time, I had graduated to reading the Poppy Ott Series, the Hardy Boy Series and the science fiction classic adventures of Tom Swift Sr. and later his son Tom Swift Jr.

I often wondered what it would be like to write stories like these; however, I never did. I usually excelled in writing assignments in high school but never followed up on it.

After I got married, I spent 12 years working in a local factory. Factory work is hard, hot, boring work and I found myself writing stories in my head as I worked. By the time I got home, I was always to hot and tired to write them down, so the stories languished and the characters died.

It was only later, in my 50’s, after three businesses that didn’t work out, that I decided to write. My first work of fiction was a book called The Magic Pipe, a story about an evil wizard that uses a pipe to seduce those that smoke it into giving him their soul. If interested, the link is here:

The Magic Pipe