Getting Started

Sixteen years ago, I found a little book named The Artist’s Way: a spiritual path to higher creativity.    I was fifty years old, leaving my arrogant, cock-sure forties and sailing into the transitional fifties.   Twelve weeks later I was sure that I was meant to be a writer.   Now, in my chosen career of electrical engineering, my skills as a writer were highly valued and, in fact, I was writing hundreds of pages of technical reports and proposals … but that didn’t count.  So, I began to write short stories.  Truthfully, they weren’t very good, although my wife and a few friends who read them were kind.   Fortunately, one of the precepts of  The Artist’s Way was If you want to be a good artist, let yourself be a bad artist.   To try to move my progress along, I enrolled in a Fiction Writing program at Cal State Fullerton.

When I used to play golf, I was a duffer for sure.   But what makes golf such a seductive game is that you can be shooting an awful round, then suddenly … out of the blue … you can chip in a shot from fifty yards out.   You’re Tiger Woods (at least the old Tiger Woods), if only for a moment.  Writing is like that for me … although when all is said and done, I write for myself, a little positive feedback from a reader goes a long way.   And sure enough, as my work improved, I began to get positive feedback from my teacher and from other students … and even though I continued to get rejections from literary magazines, I was hooked.    Eventually, one story, Cameos, was published by a now defunct magazine, Byline (you can read it here if you’re interested).  Based on a character I developed in class, I began working on a novel, A Dangerous Misconception.  The combination of a series of rejections from publishers and negative response from my critique group led me to that awful place where you know … the novel doesn’t work.

I continued to write … short stories and essays, mostly … but I was gun shy now.   My work languished unread in numerous notebooks hiding in desk drawers or my backpack.   Now, my friend, Truck (yes, Truck) is also a writer and one day about two years ago, he said, I started a blog.  I’d like you to take a look at it.   A blog.  As I recall, I’d never even read a blog, but I read his.   I was intrigued.   I wrote a little essay titled Feeling Old that talked about the experience of reaching sixty-five years old.   Truck read it and encouraged me to try blogging.   I don’t know if he suggested WordPress.com or not, but WordPress made designing Older Eyes incredibly easy.     I published Feeling Older as my first post on March 4, 2009.   There were five comments, all encouraging.  I was Tom Wolfe, if only for a moment.

It’s Top Sites Tuesday No. 82 and the question of the day is What made you decide to become a blogger? The answer is simple … my friend, Truck and WordPress.  Nineteen months, 299 posts, 753 comments and 11,494 views later (but who’s counting?), I’m a blogger.   And as a blogger, I’d ask you to push my button … gently … to make me number one on Top Sites Tuesday Number 82.   And I’d love it if you’d leave me a comment.

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