During my “first” career, I always carried around the germ of the idea that I could write. After all, I was actually teaching writing. After all, I was asking children to write for me. They were writing classroom assignments. They were writing things for me like letters, personal journals, essays, and short stories. Interestingly enough, rather late in my career I took a series of classes on how to help children write more, and write better. My germ grew a bit. It did not explode into an infection. I was too mechanical. Then a very interesting thing happened. . . That thing was the advent of useful personal computers, word-processing software, and linked printers. The first computer in our home was very simple and the copy was case insensitive. However, that first machine was liberating, and my ability to communicate grew immensely. I do not know how to type. I have never had a class in typing, or keyboarding. My keyboarding is therefore very religious: I seek and I may find. Also known as “hunt and peck.” The little gnomes in their back rooms were busy all the time I was learning this early part. Suddenly software spell checkers burst upon the scene! Error marker! Wow! Multiple fonts were magic. And color! Cut and Paste. Delete. Restore! Hey, this thing is getting to be really, really useful. Bulletins, newsletters, posters, notes, e-mail. Writing was becoming easier and easier to “do.” The germ grew into a patch, a colony, hiding somewhere inside. My career went in directions that moved away from much creative writing. The colony remained. I retired. Early. Plop! Directionless. When asked about my plans, I replied, “Oh. I think I will write.” After a few weeks of hearing this, my dear wife challenged me, “When are you going to write?” I gathered materials. I got the usual books together. I subscribed to magazines that I thought might help. I was delaying the actual doing. I was avoiding the writing process. My wife is also a teacher. She knew very well what I was doing. She called me on it, again. Today my advice is different, but in those days, I thought that you actually had to have something to say, or something that “lit your fire”, or that you had to have “some message” that you wanted to convey. So I thought about writing, and what I wanted to write about. I decided that my first efforts would be in a field that I had enjoyed as a consumer for over forty years: science fiction. I sketched out a brief plot and started to put beads on the string. Words in sentences. I discovered that writing, crafting language, was more difficult than I had thought. Writing was hard work. I would sit at the keyboard and the words just would not flow. I had to set goals for myself. A whole page. Five pages. Fifteen pages. Thirty-five pages. I started carrying a spiral notebook with me all the time. I wrote in the car while waiting for other family members do the shopping. I also found that sometimes I was much more creative and the word flow was better with just a pen in my hand. I learned to keep that notebook beside my bed, so 3 AM inspiration could be saved and reworked in the light of day. Early on, I discovered that I was really writing something, a story, that would please me. At that point, that was A.O.K.. I needed the practice. I kept at it, and finally finished my first book that had grown to two large volumes. I loved it. I’ve never even tried to publish it. It still lives on my hard drive and on optical storage disks. Maybe someday I’ll dust it off and see if it can be made into something of commercial value. By this time the word flow volume was consistently good. I’d started another book even before I finished the first. At about that time, I was contacted by an agent. I may have collected a rejection slip by that time. My agent experience? I spent a lot of money with that agent. I collected a longer list of rejection slips. I kept writing. I have never continued to push out manuscripts. It is expensive. The wait is terrible. The emotional rollercoaster is debilitating. Your chances of being picked up by a traditional publisher as an unpublished author are between zip and zilch. You learn about how traditional publishers use a transom. That is perhaps my personal failing. Not being tough enough to withstand all the rejection. In the meantime, technology has been making new opportunities available to writers like me. Print On Demand. Every author should carefully examine this method of publishing their work. In the Winter of 2004-5, such as Winter exists here in Hawaii, I enjoyed a “Eureka” moment. Seven months later I had finished a book in a new genre. I was seriously looking at POD publishing. My book is now published. I’m working with a marketing agent. We are working on several avenues, and I am very involved in building a service for writers.
(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace completed an MA and taught in the public schools for 28 years. He recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, the layers of money sucking priesthood, and their departures from the fundamental ideas and messages of Religion. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will outrage everyone. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com
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