How my writing career began.

I remember sitting in the small supposed dining room in my grandmother’s house on Lay Lake in Alabama sometime in high school. It was a two story home shaped like two octagons glued together. From the living room, you walked through the long and narrow kitchen to the dining room. In it was not a dining room table as one might imagine, but a large desk where my grandmother would handle her affairs. She had turned it into a quaint little office.

Grandma had a word processor sitting against the wall, the kind that came in a case and you could carry around with you – portable. I remember you slid the thing out of the case like a sleeve and I believe it had a flip up screen. I don’t remember the name branded on the word processor, but it was much like today’s laptops – only with a massive typewriter-size keyboard and what amounted to a 7″ monitor. Oh, I forgot. It also had a dot-matrix printer (Remember those?) that you could hook up to it.

When I would go visit on the weekends – I’d usually venture down on Friday nights and come home Sunday nights – I would sit in the plush chair at the desk, staring out the window at the lake through the trees and search for inspiration. My eyes would meet the little monitor with the orange cursor and inklings of stories would begin to flow.

At that time in my life though, that’s all my writing ever really amounted to, just inklings. I used to have a collection of stories I had started back then, but one way or another throughout the years they’ve become lost. I can say though that I never actually finished one. And when I say inkling, I mean I got a paragraph or two in before I hit the wall.

I remember listening to my grandmother cook delicious treats for me in the kitchen as I tried to type away, churning out (as I pretended) my next big novel. I remember her basset hound – I’ve long since forgotten his name – waddling through the kitchen and plopping down at my feet. I remember staring at that little screen for hours on end, just typing whatever came to mind.

It wasn’t long after she sold the house – she was aging and could no longer handle the steep incline the house sat on – that I quit writing altogether. Well, I shouldn’t say altogether. I began writing poetry later on in high school and kept at it for a few years. In college I tried to force myself to get back into writing, but forcing myself took the fun out of it and I quickly lost interest.

When I began writing again, it had been a good ten years since I put anything on paper. I began toying around with it and found joy in it again. In speaking with my grandma a couple years ago, she asked “Why don’t you just go for it?” It got me to thinking and well, I went for it. I have since published – self published, but whatever – my first book, started this web site, written twelve short stories for my monthly Shorts! series, entered a writing contest, and as of today have written twelve stories for Write Anything’s Fiction Friday.

So my writing career began a long time ago in a little house on Lay Lake in Alabama with an old fashioned word processor, died, and began again two years ago with the gentle prodding of the same woman. I wish grandma had kept hold of that old thing. I think it would be kind of fun to take it out of its sleeve now and then and stare at that little screen with the orange cursor.

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