Chasing A Dream

I was fifteen years old when I discovered that I wanted to be a writer. It was during the summer of 1990 and I was spending the summer in Birmingham, Alabama with my mother and two sisters. I don't know why I decided that I wanted to be a writer, but looking back now, twenty-three years later, everything that had happened to me before that summer were stepping stones to that summer.
I was six years old when my parents separated. I was attending the first grade at the time, at Cook Elementary School in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I didn't do very well at school, I guess, because I was distracted by my family drama. I  had to repeat the first grade. I did much better the second time that I went through the first grade, picking up everything that I had missed the first time. I soon became bored. And so, I started reading.
At first, I read westerns, because I was interested in that period of American history. And probably, because I lived in the West. I moved to Phoenix, Arizona with my father and stepmother (he remarried two years after leaving my mother, on my birthday) in the summer of 1986.
After the summer of 1990, I stopped reading Westerns and started reading science-fiction. I made a few attempts at writing stories, but I never got past the planning stage.
I stopped reading science fiction and stopped trying to write after the summer of 1997, after I had read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. I realized, because of that novel, that I could use my own life as inspiration for a novel. I then spent the next few years trying to do that.
I finished writing my first novel when I was twenty-six years old, in the summer of 2001. I then the next few years editing it and trying to get it published. I lost it a few years later.
I didn't give up, though, and wrote four more novels. My debut novel, In the Middle, will be published soon, in a few weeks and I have finished the second draft of another novel. And I will be starting the first draft of another novel soon.
I've spent more than half of my life chasing my dream of being a writer and I've closer to it rea
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Published on July 25, 2013 20:11
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