Insecure Writer’s Support Group
January 8 question – What started you on your writing journey? Was it a particular book, movie, story, or series? Was it a teacher/coach/spouse/friend/parent? Did you just “know” suddenly you wanted to write? My awesome co-hosts for the January 8 posting of the IWSG are T. Powell Coltrin, Victoria Marie Lees, Stephen Tremp, Renee Scattergood, and J.H. Moncrieff!
In high school we had an option for an English elective of “Creative Writing”. I signed up. I think I already had stories in my head, ideas for Star Trek episodes and such.
So I had this novel idea (idea for a novel?) about a future earth/US and people rediscovering technologies lost in some disaster/catastrophe. It got started but never finished. It was fun world building a culture that had been lost. How would descendants figure things out? The same idea is in a more recent book I’ve been working on, now that I think about it.
So things just ‘sat’ for a long time, although I did daydream stories. Then I was at my parents’ home one summer (as a teacher – summers off) and was reading three paperback books a day (romances – talk about potato chip reading) during a family trip to their property in Wisconsin in the woods and after three days of this I told my mother I thought I could write something as good as I was reading.
Her response was…”Do it.”
Back at her house I used Mom’s computer while she was at work and hammered out a book. It’s been transferred from one storage format to another about three times (if that will give you an idea of how far back we are talking). It has never been published, but when I went back to the ‘day job’, as my father would call it, I started spending my nights writing. It wasn’t until about three years ago that, thanks to my daughter-in-law who gave me the next ‘poke’, I got into e-publishing.
So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
