My writing journey began, like for many of us, in grade school, but I don’t recall much about what I wrote, except for that science report on the ionosphere in sixth grade. I did have to keep a journal in seventh grade English class when we lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but found it hard to have a conversation with myself on paper. The only other writing I can recall as a youth was in high school Spanish class when I did a report on bullfighting.
That’s not exactly a stellar writing pedigree, and indeed when I entered college at Humboldt State University I had to take a remedial writing class. My neighbor, Mr. Bivens, taught the class and from him I learned some valuable rules of writing, none more valuable than the self-contradicting rules that New York Times columnist (and Pulitzer Prize winner) William Safire cleverly presented in 1979. I can’t say that I follow all of the rules all of the time, but overall they definitely help to make a sentence sound right.
My reading was not particularly voracious, like with many accomplished authors, but on occasion I did enjoy a good mystery (Agatha Christie) or adventure (Alistair MacLean). Of course we had required reading in high school of such classics as All Quiet on the Western Front, The Jungle, and The Grapes of Wrath. As an adult I discovered the Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry (another Pulitzer Prize winner) and now consider him my literary idol. Just consider the following story about his colonoscopy and tell me it’s not the funniest thing you’ve ever read.
Not the funniest? Well, I guess beauty (and humor) is in the eye of the beholder. Whoops, I just used a cliché and parentheses, violating William Safire’s Rules 36 and 40. I suppose rules are meant to be broken. Did I just violate Rule 36 again?
When I took a technical writing class at the University of Idaho, I squeaked by with a C. I steadily got better with technical writing as a civil engineer for the Corps of Engineers in Sacramento. But I longed to write about things other than water and flooding. I eventually took on a weekend gig writing sports articles for the Auburn Journal newspaper. Most of my articles were about high school football games. I drove to some pretty remote places in the Sierra-Nevada foothills, froze my butt off watching the games in crisp autumn air, stayed up all night writing about the games to meet my early morning deadline, and was paid hardly anything. I loved it . . . for a while.
I took another gig writing feature stories for a magazine in Placer County. One story was about the California Red-legged Frog and another was about memorial highways and bridges. For those of you brave enough, contact me at the link above and I’d be happy to share them with you. I was paid with coupons for free food at the restaurants advertising in the magazine, which became defunct after a short time.
I retired in 2016 and began to create. I self-published my premiere novella, a crime thriller titled The Man with the Yellowfin Tuna, as an ebook in 2017. I experimented with genres and other ebooks followed (please see book descriptions). Now four of the books (and soon five) are also available as paperbacks.
I’ve enjoyed my writing journey immensely thus far. Where it will lead, I don’t know, but please, won’t you come along?