MLO asked Scott Hawkins:

Not so much a question but an observation: I read a ridiculously embarrassing amount of books and, to this day, over a year later, The Library at Mount Char is still at the top of my Favorite Books of All Time list. Obligatory field-verification-question: What, if anything, made you decide to start writing fiction?

Scott Hawkins Hey MLO,

I guess it was opportunity, as much as anything? I'm 47, so I grew up in the 70s. I'm not sure how old you are, but it's hard to overstate just how boring it could get in the suburbs back then. Both my parents worked, so I was basically alone all day. Video games and the internet didn't exist. Video tapes didn't come around until the 80s. I didn't have any money, there were no woods to explore, and I don't like sports. Hell, cable TV wasn't really a thing yet. There just wasn't much to do.

I spent my first few years drawing Iron Man suits on notebook paper, but that eventually wore thin. Around that time, I noticed that the local library was free and you could check out as many books as you like.

I was kind of lukewarm on the whole reading thing until I picked up one called Have Space Suit, Will Travel, one of the Heinlein juveniles. I was around eight or nine? Mind. Blown. For the next few years I was basically a crackhead for SF/F.

Eventually I branched out into Stephen King. I picked up a copy of 'Salem's Lot and loved it. The main character in that one, Ben Mears, is a writer. I'm pretty sure that reading about him was the first time it occurred to me that writing was something a person could do for money. Better still, you could (in theory) get paid even if you were twelve years old. I looked into it, and it turned out that Twilight Zone Magazine paid something like $0.10 / word for short stories. That was crazy money for a 2500-word short. How hard could it be? It's just words in a row, right?

I've still got a couple of those first rejection slips around somewhere. Library at Mount Char was my first (fiction) sale. :-) You want to know what sweet is? Finally winning one after three decades of failure.

More than you probably realize, I'm quite sincerely glad that you liked the book. :-)

--Scott

Edit: It occurs to me that I may have misunderstood the question. Writing fiction was always the primary goal. But somewhere in the second or third decade of failure , I stumbled over an opportunity to write the computer books. It was an actual want ad in the corner of a web site I was visiting for work. (Unlike with fiction, publishers don't get a lot of volunteers to write the ______ Desk Reference.) So I did the Linux book, then a couple of others. It hasn't hurt my career any, but there wasn't a whole lot of satisfaction in the process other than seeing my name on the shelf. The way I always describe it to people is that writing a computer book is exactly as fun as writing 30 term papers in a row. So the computer books came out first, but they were always a sideline to what I actually wanted to do.

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