Here We Go

I wrote my first story 43 years ago. It was a chilling tale of lightening and rain, and pending doom, entitled, "The Stormy Night." My mother has kept it and treasured it for years. I have it now. It was written in pencil, on lined paper. The plot was rather thin, the characters not quite developed and correct spelling was not a priority. I even added some illustrations to the one page drama. In the years since, I wrote a few things here and there, usually not finishing the project but making a bold attempt to become a writer. I remember as a freshman in college telling a new acquaintance after Writing Composition 101 that I wanted to become a writer. He said, "wow, you must have lived a very interesting life." To which I had to acknowledge at least to myself, I had not. This discouraged me, this tiny seed of doubt unwittingly planted by my new classmate. After much consideration, and encouragement from my father, I put the dream to be the next J.D. Salinger on hold, for the next 33 years. I flirted with the idea over the years, over scotch and good books, and good movies about writers, but I rarely took the time to put an idea of a story on paper, until now. I don't know if it has taken 33 years to make my life interesting enough to become a writer, but I do believe I have come to a point in my life where I can summon the passion needed to take my life experiences and infuse them into some kind of interesting and compelling story form.

Lately I have been working on a couple stories, and actually have a few in the drawer...well, actually saved on a zip drive device...that I am going to dust off and see if I can add the passion that I could not a few years ago when I first wrote them, and then see if I can get something published. Or rather, see if what I am saying means anything to you out there.

I am going to try to give my stories a voice about the modern world we live in. I want to explore relationships in the age of the internet, the difficulty in finding and living our true selves, and the hope that love can be found in the contemporary world so easily disconnected from one another.

I am going to use this blog as my sounding board to reflect on the writing process and the development of my stories. I am not advertising this...yet. If you stumble across this, and you are interested in my progress, by all means leave a comment and let me know. After all, I am in search of the possibility of connections in our digital age.

Hopefully by the end of this week, I should have one of the stories I'm working on finished to the point that I can begin work on the second draft. I am approaching my projects as a two fold process. The first process is to get the story down on paper...I'm referring to this as the skeleton. "The Stormy Night," never made it past this stage. The next part will be the adding flesh to the skeleton to give it life. I've also thought about it like adding music to words. Anyway, I'm close to getting the skeleton ready for it's new body. When I get some of the body parts done, I'll post them on this blog and we'll see what happens from there.

Let's keep in touch.