Surfacing...surfacing...

Apologies for the delay in posting - I thought I would stay off the keyboard until I had something to talk about. General weirdness at work makes for mental and emotional exhaustion behind the keys.

I've often thought about what makes it possible to write - I've been writing stuff...nothing publishable, I guess...since I was 11. I don't know why I started but I picked up a Mead 5-subject ringed notebook and just started filling the pages with a story built around a protagonist with the most god-awful name ever: Daytona Titanium.

Sue me, I was 11.

Daytona was a starfighter pilot and I managed to weave story elements into this novel from Star Wars, Star Trek, Always (the Spielberg movie) and whatever else was on my mind at the time. Every couple of pages I'd include a (poorly-drawn) picture of the action in progress. I knew when it was time to wrap it up because I was getting to the yellow-cardboard partition between sections. I kept at it, showing it to other kids and essentially cementing my reputation as the 'talented-but-weird' kid.

I gave up writing for a while due to some poorly-timed advice by my mother; I chucked what amounted to several years of work into the fire one night. I haven't spoken about Daytona or the book since.

In high school, after being inspired once again by some great books I was reading (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Caine Mutiny) I started writing again. One-page essays that I couldn't translate into stories, just long-winded descriptions of strange, folksy characters that might have existed in Maycomb, Alabama in a modern context. I wanted to write a book that touched me as deeply as 'Mockingbird' had.

I started writing for my own blog about 12 years ago - converted that to my own domain site a few years after that and just kept noodling. As of right now, I've only taken the first step off of 'noodling' - I've put out some of my work for other people to read and respond to. Their enthusiasm has been gratifying.

If anything, though, I just wish I had done it sooner.