Being a writer

I have always been one. Or at least, I have always remembered being one. I still have notebooks from childhood that contain stories I wrote. I remember composing a story in fifth grade about a drop of water and his adventures spent going down the drain (there was quite an episode involving the blades of the garbage disposal). After an epiphany in 11th grade, I knew I wanted to be a screenwriter and devoted a great deal of time and money to studying screenwriting in college. I even moved to Los Angeles for a brief period in order to pursue my dream (turns out, L.A. is fun to visit, but I didn’t want to live there). My love of movies, however, landed me a few freelance jobs, writing about classic films. I actually received payment for my writing (which, however small it may have been, was still pretty awesome). And despite my swerve into a career in teaching (high school English, yo), I still consider myself a writer. I have always been one and I always will be.

But now I’m doing something different. I’m actually committing myself to the goal of become a fiction author. It’s the thing my fifth grade heart always wanted, but somehow over the past twenty years, I let it slip out of my head. I let other jobs, other goals, other types of writing seep in, but now, finally (and maybe it took starting a family to realize it), finally I’ve decided that I really should do the one thing I’ve always wanted to do: Write books.

So now I’m here — as a way to connect with others, as a way to document my journey, as a way to make sure I stick with it — and hopefully over the next several months, I will go from being a writer who is trying to write a novel to a writer who has written one.

What will follow on this blog are things related to my novel, things related to my writing process, things related to my life, things related to the things I love (mostly, but not limited to: science fiction, fantasy, comic books, new movies, classic movies, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, theater, folklore and fairy tales, language, J.R.R. Tolkien, Harry Potter, music, theater, and magic). My hope is that this blog will keep me honest. I say I’m a writer; now all I have to do is write.